Simultaneous PET Image Reconstruction and Feature Extraction Method using Non-negative, Smooth, and Sparse Matrix Factorization

Abstract

Positron emission tomography (PET) is an important imaging technique to visualize a number of functions in the brain or human body. For reconstructing PET images from the sinogram data, an inverse problem has to be solved using numerical optimizations such as expectation-maximization (EM)-based methods. However, the standard EM method suffers from measurement noise added in the sinogram data. In this paper, we propose a new simultaneous PET image reconstruction and parts extraction method using constrained non-negative matrix factorization. In contrast that the many existing methods reconstruct a single PET image independently, we reconstruct the time-series of PET images simultaneously from the time-series of sinograms using non-negative matrix factorization. Furthermore, we impose the smoothness constraint for the temporal feature, and the exclusive LASSO-based sparseness constraint for the spatial feature for robust image reconstruction and physically meaningful feature extraction.