PET is a medical imaging modality with proven clinical value for disease diagnosis and treatment monitoring. The integration of PET and CT on modern scanners provides a synergy of the two imaging modalities. Through different mathematical algorithms, PET data can be reconstructed into the spatial distribution of the injected radiotracer. With dynamic imaging, kinetic parameters of specific biological processes can also be determined. Numerous efforts have been devoted to the development of PET image reconstruction methods over the last four decades, encompassing analytic and iterative reconstruction methods. This article provides an overview of the commonly used methods. Current challenges in PET image reconstruction include more accurate quantitation, TOF imaging, system modeling, motion correction and dynamic reconstruction. Advances in these aspects could enhance the use of PET/CT imaging in patient care and in clinical research studies of pathophysiology and therapeutic interventions.
Keywordsanalytic reconstruction; fully 3D imaging; iterative reconstruction; maximum-likelihood expectation-maximization method; PET PET is a medical imaging modality with proven clinical value for the detection, staging and monitoring of a wide variety of diseases. This technique requires the injection of a radiotracer, which is then monitored externally to generate PET data [1,2]. Through different algorithms, PET data can be reconstructed into the spatial distribution of a radiotracer. PET imaging provides noninvasive, quantitative information of biological processes, and such functional information can be combined with anatomical information from CT scans. The integration of PET and CT on modern PET/CT scanners provides a synergy of the two imaging modalities, and can lead to improved disease diagnosis and treatment monitoring [3,4].Considering that PET imaging is limited by high levels of noise and relatively poor spatial resolution, numerous research efforts have been devoted to the development and improvement of PET image reconstruction methods since the introduction of PET in the 1970s. This article provides a brief introduction to tomographic reconstruction and an overview of the commonly used methods for PET. We start with the problem formulation and then introduce data correction methods. We then proceed with reconstruction methods