An improved ordered subsets expectation maximization positron emission computerized tomography reconstruction

Ordered subsets expectation maximization (OS-EM) reconstruction method is usually used in positron emission tomography (PET). But it has some disadvantage such as long computation time and bad reconstruction quality. Filtered back projection (FBP), that has many advantages such as simple structure and short reconstruction time, is firstly introduced into the initialization stage of the OS-EM to fast the reconstruction process. Then, the smoothness method is applied after the OS-EM algorithm to improve the reconstruction speed and quality. The reconstructed images are compared for both the simulated phantom data and the brain magnetic resonance imaging data. The improved OS-EM is shown to be more feasible than the standard OS-EM within the same iteration steps and in higher signal noise ratio (SNR) condition.