Pragmatic fully 3D image reconstruction for the MiCES mouse imaging PET scanner

We present a pragmatic approach to image reconstruction for data from the micro crystal elements system (MiCES) fully 3D mouse imaging positron emission tomography (PET) scanner under construction at the University of Washington. Our approach is modelled on fully 3D image reconstruction used in clinical PET scanners, which is based on Fourier rebinning (FORE) followed by 2D iterative image reconstruction using ordered-subsets expectation-maximization (OSEM). The use of iterative methods allows modelling of physical effects (e.g., statistical noise, detector blurring, attenuation, etc), while FORE accelerates the reconstruction process by reducing the fully 3D data to a stacked set of independent 2D sinograms. Previous investigations have indicated that non-stationary detector point-spread response effects, which are typically ignored for clinical imaging, significantly impact image quality for the MiCES scanner geometry. To model the effect of non-stationary detector blurring (DB) in the FORE+OSEM(DB) algorithm, we have added a factorized system matrix to the ASPIRE reconstruction library. Initial results indicate that the proposed approach produces an improvement in resolution without an undue increase in noise and without a significant increase in the computational burden. The impact on task performance, however, remains to be evaluated.