access icon free MR contingency supplement prior for joint estimation of activity and attenuation in non-time-of-flight positron emission tomography/MR

Maximum likelihood reconstruction of activity and attenuation (MLAA) from emission data only suffered from the inherent cross-talk between the estimated attenuation and activity distributions. The authors proposed an improved MLAA algorithm by utilising tissue prior atlas (TPA) and a Gibbs prior as prior knowledge. TPA determines the plausible region for each of the typical attenuation coefficients; hence, it imposes statistical condition as a supplement for the exclusive magnetic resonance (MR) information on the reconstruction process of attenuation map. Therefore, along with the soft tissue distribution provided by the segmentation of MR images, an air mask and a bone probability map breakdown the MR low-signal class into four subclasses in order to favour recognition of air and bone. Estimations on attenuation coefficients are realised as a mixture of pseudo-Gaussian distributions. The proposed algorithm is evaluated using the simulated 3D emission data. The proposed MLAA-TPA algorithm is compared with the MR-MLAA algorithm proposed by Heußer et al. Their results demonstrate that the MR-MLAA algorithm performance depends heavily on the MR segmentation accuracy well handled by MLAA-TPA. The quantification results illustrated that the MLAA-TPA outperformed the MR-MLAA algorithm owing to reduction of misclassification and more precise tissue detection.

Inspec keywords: probability; biomedical MRI; bone; image classification; image segmentation; Gaussian distribution; biological tissues; maximum likelihood estimation; image reconstruction; medical image processing; positron emission tomography

Other keywords: emission data; MLAA-TPA algorithm; air mask; maximum likelihood reconstruction; pseudoGaussian distributions; attenuation coefficients; MR-MLAA algorithm performance; exclusive magnetic resonance information; MR image segmentation; attenuation map; MR contingency supplement prior; nontime-of-flight positron emission tomography/MR; inherent cross-talk; attenuation estimation; bone probability map breakdown; soft tissue distribution; Gibbs prior; tissue prior atlas; activity distributions

Subjects: Computer vision and image processing techniques; Other topics in statistics; Patient diagnostic methods and instrumentation; Nuclear medicine, emission tomography; Optical, image and video signal processing; Biomedical magnetic resonance imaging and spectroscopy; Other topics in statistics; Biology and medical computing; Probability theory, stochastic processes, and statistics; Nuclear medicine, emission tomography; Medical magnetic resonance imaging and spectroscopy

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http://iet.metastore.ingenta.com/content/journals/10.1049/el.2018.0708
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