Kalman sinogram restoration for fast and accurate PET image reconstruction

Sinogram restoration followed by filtered backprojection (FBP) is a fast me thod for obtaining PET images of good quality and quantitative accuracy. In previous studies, we used detector motion and the method of projection ont o convex sets for sinogram restoration to improve on FBP reconstruction; bu t, the performance was observed to degrade rapidly when the noise level of PET data increased. In this paper, we describe a sinogram restoration metho d based on Kalman filtering that provides promising results in computer sim ulations. The potential benefits of this new method includes improved noise performance and a low computational cost which is comparable to that of co nventional FBP.