Iterative Simultaneous Attenuation Correction and Activity Estimation for Time-of-Flight Positron Emission Tomography

An accurate quantitative estimation of the radioactive tracer distribution in positron emission tomography (PET) requires correction of the observed emission data for the attenuation factors. For this purpose, transmission data, provided by X-ray computerized tomography (CT) or magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), are often used to measure the attenuation rate in observed PET data. In this paper, we propose an iterative simultaneous attenuation correction and activity estimation method without transmission data. In each iteration, the proposed method disperses the attenuation effect in the time-of-flight (TOF) PET sinogram in each line-of-response to the current iterates for the activity estimate, then uses that iterate to update the attenuation rate in the TOF PET sinogram, and finally use that updated attenuation rate in computing the next iterates. The simulation result shows that the proposed method corrects attenuation artifact accurately and produces activity estimates comparable to reconstructed ones from attenuation-free data.