With dynamic positron emission tomography (PET), we study the metabolic processes by monitoring the uptake of a radioactive tracer. The goal is to reconstruct the time-activity curves (TACs) of the voxels, from which the relevant kinetic parameters can be obtained. These curves are assumed to have the algebraic form of a pre-determined kinetic model. Plausible algebraic forms have a limited number of free parameters and thus can be used even for low-statistic measurements. The kinetic model typically involves the amount of radiotracer in the blood, which should be determined either by direct measurement or by extracting it from the PET data using image-derived or model-based methods. However, the direct measurement of the blood concentration is complicated, and the results of the image-derived and the model-based methods are also not reliable because of the partial volume effect and the unknown fraction of blood in the voxels. Moreover, in direct dynamic tomography, the kinetic model is fit from the very beginning of the reconstruction, thus the blood input function is needed even before the image-derived or model-based approaches can provide it. In this paper, we propose a method that is based on compartmental modeling and the Feng blood input function model defined by a fourth-order exponential equation with a pair of repeated eigenvalues, but does not require the blood input function and the fraction of blood parameters explicitly. Thus, the model can be used in cases when we wish to have the robustness and advantages of compartmental modeling, but no blood input function measurement is available. The test results show that the added error in the TACs of not knowing the blood input is reduced in comparison with the spline-based TAC representation. The method can be applied in reference tissue analysis and in image-derived input function approaches.
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