Realization of high-end PET devices that assist conventional PET devices in improving image quality via diffusion modeling.

Purpose: This study aimed to implement high-end positron emission tomography (PET) equipment to assist conventional PET equipment in improving image quality via a distribution learning-based diffusion model.

Methods: A diffusion model was first trained on a dataset of high-quality (HQ) images acquired by a high-end PET device (uEXPLORER scanner), and the quality of the conventional PET images was later improved on the basis of this trained model built on null-space constraints. Data from 180 patients were used in this study. Among them, 137 patients who underwent total-body PET/computed tomography scans via a uEXPLORER scanner at the Sun Yat-sen University Cancer Center were retrospectively enrolled. The datasets of 50 of these patients were used to train the diffusion model. The remaining 87 cases and 43 PET images acquired from The Cancer Imaging Archive were used to quantitatively and qualitatively evaluate the proposed method. The nonlocal means (NLM) method, UNet and a generative adversarial network (GAN) were used as reference methods.

Results: The incorporation of HQ imaging priors derived from high-end devices into the diffusion model through network training can enable the sharing of information between scanners, thereby pushing the limits of conventional scanners and improving their imaging quality. The quantitative results showed that the diffusion model based on null-space constraints produced better and more stable results than those of the methods based on NLM, UNet and the GAN and is well suited for cross-center and cross-device imaging.

Conclusion: A diffusion model based on null-space constraints is a flexible framework that can effectively utilize the prior information provided by high-end scanners to improve the image quality of conventional scanners in cross-center and cross-device scenarios.