A scheme for accidental coincidence correction in time-of-flight positron tomography: theory and implementation

A computationally inexpensive method is described for correcting time-of-flight positron-emission-tomography (PET) images for accidental coincidences. Initial runs of the algorithm show that it rapidly (2-6 iterations) yields accurate estimates of single rates from simulated data corrupted by Poisson noise. Two illustrative experiments with the method are described. >