Comparison of 3D-OP-OSEM and 3D-FBP reconstruction algorithms for High-Resolution Research Tomograph studies: effects of randoms estimation methods

The High-Resolution Research Tomograph (HRRT) is a dedicated human brain positron emission tomography (PET) scanner. Recently, a 3D filtered backprojection (3D-FBP) reconstruction method has been implemented to reduce bias in short duration frames, currently observed in 3D ordinary Poisson OSEM (3D-OP-OSEM) reconstructions. Further improvements might be expected using a new method of variance reduction on randoms (VRR) based on coincidence histograms instead of using the delayed window technique (DW) to estimate randoms. The goal of this study was to evaluate VRR in combination with 3D-OP-OSEM and 3D-FBP reconstruction techniques. To this end, several phantom studies and a human brain study were performed. For most phantom studies, 3D-OP-OSEM showed higher accuracy of observed activity concentrations with VRR than with DW. However, both positive and negative deviations in reconstructed activity concentrations and large biases of grey to white matter contrast ratio (up to 88%) were still observed as a function of scan statistics. Moreover 3D-OP-OSEM+VRR also showed bias up to 64% in clinical data, i.e. in some pharmacokinetic parameters as compared with those obtained with 3D-FBP+VRR. In the case of 3D-FBP, VRR showed similar results as DW for both phantom and clinical data, except that VRR showed a better standard deviation of 6-10%. Therefore, VRR should be used to correct for randoms in HRRT PET studies.