Evaluation of imaging systems using the posterior variance of emission counts.

We investigate an approach to evaluation of emission-tomography (ET) imaging systems used for region-of-interest (ROI) estimation tasks. In the evaluation we employ the concept of "emission counts" (EC), which are the number of events per voxel emitted during a scan. We use the reduction in posterior variance of ROI EC, compared to the prior ROI EC variance, as the metric of primary interest, which we call the "posterior variance reduction index" (PVRI). Systems that achieve a higher PVRI are considered superior to systems with lower PVRI. The approach is independent of the reconstruction method and is applicable to all photon-limited data types including list-mode data. We analyzed this approach using a model of 2-D tomography, and compared our results to the classical theory of tomographic sampling. We found that performance evaluations using the PVRI index were consistent with the classical theory. System evaluation based on EC posterior variance is an intuitively appealing and physically meaningful method that is useful for evaluation of system performance in ROI quantitation tasks.