Kalman sinogram restoration for fast and accurate PET image reconstruction

Sinogram restoration followed by filtered backprojection (FBP) is a fast method for obtaining PET images of good quality and quantitative accuracy. In previous studies, the authors used detector motion and the method of projection onto convex sets for sinogram restoration to improve on FBP reconstruction; but, the performance was observed to degrade rapidly when the noise level of PET data increased. In this paper, the authors describe a sinogram restoration method based on Kalman filtering that provides promising results in computer simulations. The potential benefits of this new method includes improved noise performance and a low computational cost which is comparable to that of conventional FBP.