Spatiotemporal PET reconstruction with Learned Registration

Abstract: Because of the long acquisition time of Positron Emission Tomography scanners, the reconstructed images are blurred by motion. We hereby propose a novel motion-correction maximum-likelihood expectation-maximization algorithm integrating 3D movements between the different gates estimated by a neural network trained on synthetic data with contrast invariance. We show that, compared to the classic reconstruction method, this algorithm can increase the image quality on realistic synthetic 3D data of a human body, in particular, the contrast of small carcinogenic lung lesions. For the detection of lesions of one cm on four gates for medium and high noise levels, the studied algorithm gave an increase of 45 to 130% of the Pearson correlation coefficient in comparison with classic reconstruction methods without deformations.