Abstract
Dual-panel PET scanners have many advantages in dedicated breast and on-board imaging applications since the compact scanners can be easily combined with other imaging and treatment modalities. We previously showed that the time-of-flight (TOF) provides new information compared to the non-TOF case when a PET scanner has incomplete data sampling, and the new information reduces limited-angle artifacts caused by incomplete data sampling and data truncation. In this work, we investigate the joint image reconstructions for a dedicated dual-panel TOF PET scanner, known as B-PET, for breast imaging application. It is combined with a breast tomosynthesis for attenuation correction, but can also work in a stand alone mode, and joint image reconstructions can provide quantitative breast imaging. We implement both MLAA (maximum likelihood reconstruction of attenuation and activity) and MLACF (maximum likelihood attenuation correction factors) for B-PET. An anthropomorphic breast phantom with mild compression is used in our 2D simulated reconstructions. We show that the reconstructed attenuation image in MLAA has both limited-angle artifacts and crosstalks near lesion locations; however, reconstructed activity image using MLAA can be comparable to reconstructed image using OSEM with reference attenuation correction. The reconstructed images using MLACF also has crosstalks in reconstructed activity images and attenuation factors. MLACF provide an alternative effective approach for joint reconstruction when attenuation image is not needed. We compare the noise performance of MLAA and MLACF compared to OSEM using 60 noise realizations with 1M counts. In summary, quantitative breast imaging with dual-panel TOF PET scanner is possible using joint image reconstruction with good TOF timing resolution.
Published Version
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