An MRI-guided PET Partial Volume Correction Method.

Accurate quantification of positron emission tomography (PET) is important for diagnosis and assessment of cancer treatment. The low spatial resolution of PET imaging induces partial volume effect to PET images that biases quantification. A PET partial volume correction method is proposed using high-resolution, anatomical information from magnetic resonance images (MRI). The corrected PET is pursued by removing the convolution of PET point spread function (PSF) and by preserving edges present in PET and the aligned MR images. The correction is implemented in a Bayesian's deconvolution framework that is minimized by a conjugate gradient method. The method is evaluated on simulated phantom and brain PET images. The results show that the method effectively restores 102 ± 7% of the true PET activity with a size of greater than the full-width at half maximum of the point spread function. We also applied the method to synthesized brain PET data. The method does not require prior information about tracer activity within tissue regions. It can offer a partial volume correction method for various PET applications and can be particularly useful for combined PET/MRI studies.