TOF PET offset calibration from clinical data.

In this paper, we present a timing calibration technique for time-of-flight positron emission tomography (TOF PET) that eliminates the need for a specialized data acquisition. By eliminating the acquisition, the process becomes fully automated, and can be performed with any clinical data set and whenever computing resources are available. It also can be applied retroactively to datasets for which a TOF offset calibration is missing or suboptimal. Since the method can use an arbitrary data set to perform a calibration prior to a TOF reconstruction, possibly of the same data set, one also can view this as reconstruction from uncalibrated data. We present a performance comparison with existing calibration techniques.