Rotate-and-slant projector for fast LOR-based fully-3-D iterative PET reconstruction.

One of the greatest challenges facing iterative fully-3-D positron emission tomography (PET) reconstruction is the issue of long reconstruction times due to the large number of measurements for 3-D mode as compared to 2-D mode. A rotate-and-slant projector has been developed that takes advantage of symmetries in the geometry to compute volumetric projections to multiple oblique sinograms in a computationally efficient manner. It is based upon the 2-D rotation-based projector using the three-pass method of shears, and it conserves the 2-D rotator computations for multiple projections to each oblique sinogram set. The projector is equally applicable to both conventional evenly-spaced projections and unevenly-spaced line-of-response (LOR) data. The LOR-based version models the location and orientation of the individual LORs (i.e., the arc-correction), providing an ordinary Poisson reconstruction framework. The projector was implemented in C with several optimizations for speed, exploiting the vertical symmetry of the oblique projection process, depth compression, and array indexing schemes which maximize serial memory access. The new projector was evaluated and compared to ray-driven and distance-driven projectors using both analytical and experimental phantoms, and fully-3-D iterative reconstructions with each projector were also compared to Fourier rebinning with 2-D iterative reconstruction. In terms of spatial resolution, contrast, and background noise measures, 3-D LOR-based iterative reconstruction with the rotate-and-slant projector performed as well as or better than the other methods. Total processing times, measured on a single cpu Linux workstation, were approximately 10x faster for the rotate-and-slant projector than for the other 3-D projectors studied. The new projector provided four iterations fully-3-D ordered-subsets reconstruction in as little as 15 s--approximately the same time as FORE + 2-D reconstruction. We conclude that the rotate-and-slant projector is a viable option for fully-3-D PET, offering quality statistical reconstruction in times only marginally slower than 2-D or rebinning methods.