In multi-pinhole SPECT, overlapping the projections from different pinholes has been used to increase sensitivity. However, the prevailing view is that the overall quality of the reconstructed image is not improved by the overlaps in the projections. It is often stated in literatures that overlaps introduce ambiguous information, which can lead to nonuniqueness of solution for the inverse problem, and thus artifacts are introduced in the reconstructed image. On the other hand, contrary to the prevailing view, a recent study on slit-slat collimators shows that artifacts can be removed with the "help" of an extra complete nonoverlapped projection data set. In this paper, two types of artifact-free projection overlaps are defined in general, and the criteria for designing artifact-free multi-pinhole systems with overlaps are proposed. It is shown that once the criteria are satisfied, the solution of the inverse problem is unique, and thus no artifact is expected in the reconstructed image. Via extensive simulation study, various artifact-free overlapping multi-pinhole systems are designed and validated. It is shown that overlaps in the artifact-free systems can improve contrast-to-noise ratio (CNR). With a proper design, the CNR for an artifact-free overlapping system can be significantly higher than that for the corresponding nonoverlapping system. The improved image quality is also confirmed with noisy reconstructions.

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Two-band analysis-synthesis filters or wavelet filters are used pervasively for compressing natural images. Both FIR and IIR filters have been studied in this context, the former being the most popular. In this paper, we examine the compression performance of these two-band filters in a dyadic wavelet decomposition and attempt to isolate features that contribute most directly to the performance gain. Then, employing the general exact reconstruction condition, hybrid FIR-IIR analysis-synthesis filters are designed to maximize compression performance for natural images. Experimental results are presented that compare performance with the popular biorthogonal filters in terms of peak SNR, subjective quality, and computational complexity.

Tomographic systems employing truncated projections have been developed for parallel and fan beam collimation and for cone beam CT but the idea has not been extensively explored in pinhole single photon emission computed tomography (SPECT). In this paper, we explore the sampling requirements and system performance of SPECT systems with asymmetric pinhole collimators and truncated projections. We demonstrate that complete 3D sampling can be achieved by using multiple detectors with truncated asymmetric pinholes, offset axially from each other, and a spiral orbit. The use of truncated projections can be exploited in the design of pinhole SPECT systems by moving the pinholes closer to the subject, resulting in increased sensitivity and improved spatial resolution. Truncated and untruncated pinhole systems were evaluated using the contrast-to-noise ratio (CNR) calculated from the linearized local impulse response as a figure of merit. The CNR for the truncated pinhole system was up to 60% greater than that for the untruncated system at matched resolution for a source voxel near the centre of a uniform phantom and 30% greater at the edge. We conclude that an object can be reconstructed from asymmetric pinholes with truncated projections, which leads to potentially important design considerations and applications in single- and multi-pinhole SPECT.

A new lossless compression scheme of compressing the initially-acquired continuous-intensity images with a lossy compression algorithm to obtain higher compression efficiency is proposed. Even if a lossy algorithm is employed, for decoded original images, there is no loss of data in the same sense as the conventional lossless scheme. To realize the new idea, the compression efficiency of the existing lossy subband compression algorithm is improved at high bitrates. For the entropy coding part, a run-length based, symbol-grouping entropy coding method is introduced. For the quantization part, the entropy-constrained scalar quantization is implemented using a novel and simple thresholding method. Coding results show that bit savings of the proposed lossless scheme, which employs a lossy algorithm, over the conventional lossless scheme achieve a maximum of 27.2% and an average of 11.4% in our test.INDEX TERMS Lossless image compression, lossy subband image compression, compression efficiency at high bitrates, Golomb coding, run-length based entropy coding, entropy-constrained scalar quantization.