Regional compensation for statistical maximum likelihood reconstruction error of PET image pixels

In positron emission tomography (PET), there is an increasing interest in studying not only the regional mean tracer concentration, but its variation arising from local differences in physiology, the tissue heterogeneity. However, in reconstructed images this physiological variation is shadowed by a large reconstruction error, which is caused by noisy data and the inversion of tomographic problem. We present a new procedure which can quantify the error variation in regional reconstructed values for given PET measurement, and reveal the remaining tissue heterogeneity. The error quantification is made by creating and reconstructing the noise realizations of virtual sinograms, which are statistically similar with the measured sinogram. Tests with physical phantom data show that the characterization of error variation and the true heterogeneity are possible, despite the existing model error when real measurement is considered.