Improved iterative image reconstruction with automatic noise artifact suppression.

A method for stabilizing iterative image reconstruction techniques has been developed for improving the image quality of position emission tomography. A damping matrix is introduced, which suppresses noisy correction on a pixel-by-pixel basis, depending on the statistical precision of the iterative correction. The precision is evaluated by comparing a certain number of correction submatrices, each of which is formed from a subset of the projection data. Simulation studies showed that statistical noise is effectively suppressed, while the image of the source object is reconstructed with high resolution, as long as the signal level is higher than the local noise level. In the application to the MLE (maximum likelihood estimator), the minimum RMS error of the image was reduced to 84% for 500 k total counts, and the RMS error increased more slowly with further iterations as compared with the simple MLE. The method was also applied to the FIR (filtered iterative reconstruction) algorithm, and the images were found to be better than those obtained by the convolution backprojection method.