LOCALLY WEIGHTED TOTAL VARIATION DENOISING FOR RINGING ARTIFACT SUPPRESSION IN PET RECONSTRUCTION USING PSF MODELING.

Iterative reconstruction with point spread function (PSF) modeling improves contrast recovery in positron emission tomography (PET) images, but also introduces ringing artifacts and over enhancement that is contrast and object size dependent. Mitigation of these artifacts is crucial for clinical and research purposes. In this work we introduce a new iterative regularized reconstruction method that incorporates locally-weighted total variation denoising designed to suppress artifacts induced by PSF modeling. The reconstruction method is evaluated on a simulated cylindrical phantom and preliminary results show that ringing artifacts are suppressed while contrast recovery is maintained.