Energy dependence of nonstationary scatter subtraction--restoration in high resolution PET

In previous works, the determination of object and detector scatter kernels from line source measurements was described and their application in scatter correction was investigated. It was also shown that low energy data contains a large fraction of useful events (true and detector scatter events). In the present work, data acquired in multispectral mode was summed in single broad energy windows of lower energy thresholds varying from 129 to 516 keV in steps of 43 keV and a constant upper energy threshold of 645 keV. Line-source projections were fitted by extracting the object and detector scatter kernels as a function of energy threshold. These kernels were then used to process scatter by the nonstationary convolution subtraction-restoration method in phantom images. After scatter correction, the sensitivity is found to increase by up to 64% at the lower threshold of 129 keV, relative to the conventional photopeak energy window (344-645 keV). Whereas contrast and spatial resolution are degraded as the energy discriminator is lowered, such degradation is fully recovered by the scatter correction. As a result of scatter correction, the noise increases insignificantly in hot regions but substantially in cold regions, in proportion of the amount of scatter.