Paper Info
Title
Positronium Lifetime Image Reconstruction for TOF PET
Abstract
Positron emission tomography is widely used in clinical and preclinical applications. Positronium lifetime carries information about the tissue microenvironment where positrons are emitted, but such information has not been captured because of two technical challenges. One challenge is the low sensitivity in detecting triple coincidence events. This problem has been mitigated by the recent developments of PET scanners with long (1-2 m) axial field of view. The other challenge is the low spatial resolution of the positronium lifetime images formed by existing methods that is determined by the time-of-flight (TOF) resolution (200-500 ps) of existing PET scanners. This paper solves the second challenge by developing a new image reconstruction method to generate high-resolution positronium lifetime images using existing TOF PET. Simulation studies demonstrate that the proposed method can reconstruct positronium lifetime images at much better spatial resolution than the limit set by the TOF resolution of the PET scanner. The proposed method opens up the possibility of performing positronium lifetime imaging using existing TOF PET scanners. The lifetime information can be used to understand the tissue microenvironment <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">in vivo</i> which could facilitate the study of disease mechanism and selection of proper treatments.
Year
DOI
Venue
2022
10.1109/TMI.2022.3174561
IEEE Transactions on Medical Imaging
Keywords
DocType
Volume
Positronium lifetime,lifetime image reconstruction,penalized maximum likelihood,positron emission tomography
Journal
41
Issue
ISSN
Citations 
10
0278-0062
0
PageRank 
References 
Authors
0.34
0
2
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Jinyi Qi128435.82
Bangyan Huang200.34