Simultaneous Reconstruction of the Activity Image and Registration of the CT Image in TOF-PET

Previously, maximum-likelihood methods have been proposed to jointly estimate the activity image and the attenuation image (or the attenuation sinogram) from TOF-PET data. In this contribution, we propose a method that addresses the same problem for TOF-PET/CT by combining reconstruction and registration. The method, called MLRR, iteratively reconstructs the activity image while registering the available CT-based attenuation image, so that the pair of activity and attenuation images maximize the likelihood of the TOF emission sinogram. The algorithm is evaluated on 2D and 3D simulations. © 2013 IEEE.status: publishe