Partial volume correction of small animal PET cardiac dynamic images using iterative reconstruction: effects on glucose metabolic rate measurement

Small animal positron emission tomography (PET) image quantitation is severely affected by partial volume effect (PVE) caused by the spatial resolution of PET tomographs. The aim of this work was to reduce the PVE using a modified iterative expectation maximization (EM) reconstruction algorithm. The goal of the method was to increase the accuracy of tracer concentration values in order to obtain an in vivo better estimate of physiological parameters. The performance of the proposed correction method was evaluated by calculating left ventricle and myocardium mean value using simulated cardiac fluorodeoxyglucose (FDG) dynamic images.