Fast implementation and quantitative evaluation of analytical methods with Wiener filters for image reconstruction in 3D SPECT

The authors implemented analytical methods for image reconstruction in three-dimensional single-photon emission computed tomography with uniform attenuation and distance-dependent blurring. The implementation is computationally efficient and requires less than 4 minutes for reconstruction of a 128/spl times/128/spl times/128 image on a personal computer. The authors conducted a quantitative evaluation of the reconstruction methods and showed that, when deblurring is considered, these reconstruction methods are highly susceptible to noise. They subsequently developed a Wiener apodizing window function for suppression of noise amplification in the reconstructed images. The authors also evaluated the performance of the proposed Wiener window function and the frequently used truncation window function with both noiseless and noisy data. Their numerical results demonstrated that the images generated from noisy data by use of the proposed Wiener window function have fewer ring-like artifacts and comparable quantitative accuracy in comparison with those obtained by use of the truncation window function.