Removing the interference error between attenuation correction and scatter subtraction in 3D PET imaging

A method to remove the interference between attenuation correction and scatter subtraction has been developed for the QPET 3D imaging system at Queen's University. Because the detector system has more than 10(10) lines of response, we reconstruct the image by first backprojecting, then filtering. We correct for attenuation at backprojection by weighting each event by the inverse of the attenuation factor calculated by reprojection through an attenuation image. Since the scatter background has not been corrected at backprojection time, this has the side effect that a fraction of the detected scattered events get incorrectly weighted. When a scatter subtraction is subsequently applied, the correction is inaccurate because the scatter distribution has been modified by the attenuation correction procedure. The residual interference error in the reconstructed image is a distorted image of the attenuator. An approximation to this error is obtained by reprojecting through the attenuation image, backprojecting with appropriate weights, then reconstructing. This image is then scaled and multiplied by the calculated scatter distribution to obtain an estimate of the interference error. Both simulations and measurements indicate that for our system, this method provides a reasonable approximation of the interference error in the image.