The effects of back-projection variants in BPF-like TOF PET reconstruction using CNN filtration - Based on simulated...

The back-projection strategies such as confidence weighting (CW) and most likely annihilation position (MLAP) have been adopted into back-projection-and-filtering-like (BPF-like) deep reconstruction model and shown great potential on fast and accurate PET reconstruction. Although the two methods degenerate to an identical model at the time resolution of 0 ps, they represent two distinct approaches at the realistic time resolutions of current commercial systems. There is a lack of a systematic and fair assessment on these differences.

This work aims to analyze the impact of back-projection variants on CNN-based PET image reconstruction to find the most effective back-projection model, and ultimately contribute to accurate PET reconstruction.

Different back-projection strategies (CW and MLAP) and different angular view processing methods (view-summed and view-grouped) were considered, leading to the comparison of four back-projection variants integrated with the same CNN filtration model. Meanwhile, we investigated two strategies of physical effect compensation, either introducing pre-corrected data as the input or adding a channel of attenuation map to the CNN model. After training models separately on Monte-Carlo-simulated BrainWeb phantoms with full dose (events = 3×10⁷), we tested them on both simulated phantoms and clinical brain scans with two dosage levels. For the performance assessment, peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR) and root mean square error (RMSE) were used to evaluate the pixel-wise error, structural similarity index (SSIM) to evaluate the structural similarity, and contrast recovery coefficient (CRC) in manually selected ROI to compare the region recovery.

Compared to two MLAP-based histo-image reconstruction models, two CW-based back-projected image methods produced clearer, sharper, and more detailed images, from both simulated and clinical data. For angular view processing methods, view-grouped histo-image improved image quality, while view-grouped cwbp-image showed no advantage except for contrast recovery. Quantitative analysis on simulated data demonstrated that the view-summed cwbp-image model achieved the best PSNR, RMSE, SSIM, while the 8-view cwbp-image model achieved the best CRC in lesions and the white matter. Additionally, the multi-channel input model including the back-projection image and attenuation map was proved to be the most efficient and simplest method for compensating for physical effects for brain data. Applying Gaussian blur to the histo-image yielded images with limited improvement. All above results hold for both the half-dose and the full-dose cases.

For brain imaging, the evaluation based on metrics PSNR, RMSE, SSIM, and CRC indicates that the view-summed CW-based back-projection variant is the most effective input for the BPF-like reconstruction model using CNN filtration, which can involve the attenuation map through an additional channel to effectively compensate for physical effects.