An artificial neural network for SPECT image reconstruction.

An artificial neural network has been developed to reconstruct quantitative single photon emission computed tomographic (SPECT) images. The network is trained with an ideal projection-image pair to learn a shift-invariant weighting (filter) for the projections. Once trained, the network produces weighted projections as a hidden layer when acquired projection data are presented to its input. This hidden layer is then backprojected to form an image as the network output. The learning algorithm adjusts the weighting coefficients using a backpropagation algorithm which minimizes the mean squared error between the ideal training image and the reconstructed training image. The response of the trained network to an impulse projection resembles the ramp filter typically used with backprojection, and reconstructed images are similar to filtered backprojection images.