Image reconstruction by conditional entropy maximisation for PET system

The authors show that the conditional entropy maximisation algorithm is a generalised version of the maximum likelihood algorithm for positron emission tomography (PET). Promising properties of the conditional entropy maximisation algorithm are as follows: an assumption is made that the entropy of the information content of the data should be maximised; it is a consistent way of selecting an image from the very many images that fit the measurement data; this approach takes care of the positivity of the reconstructed image pixels, since entropy does not exist for negative image pixel values; and inclusion of prior distribution knowledge in the reconstruction process is possible. Simulated experiments performed on a PET system have shown that the quality of the reconstructed image using the entropy maximisation method is good. A Gibbs distribution is used to incorporate prior knowledge into the reconstruction process. The mean squared error (MSE) of the reconstructed images shows a sharp new dip, confirming improved image reconstruction. The entropy maximisation method is an alternative approach to maximum likelihood (ML) and maximum a posteriori (MAP) methodologies