Student: Casper da Costa-Luis
1st supervisor: Andrew Reader, King’s College London
2nd supervisor: Paul Marsden, King’s College London
Positron emission tomography (PET) is a powerful medical imaging modality for the brain, for cancer and for the heart. Image reconstruction is a crucial component to the success of PET, and methodology has undergone a number of significant advances over recent years, including progression from 2D to 3D PET reconstruction (improving signal to noise ratio), progression from analytical to iterative reconstruction methods (reducing variance) and advanced modelling of the PET data acquisition to improve image quality (increasing image resolution). This latter area of advance is exemplified by the case of resolution modelling in PET. Resolution modelling in PET accounts for the positron range, photon acollinearity and limited PET detector resolution. By modelling these effects in the system matrix of iterative image reconstruction, notable improvements in end-point image quality have been demonstrated. Nonetheless, advances are still very much needed, and the aim of this project is to deal with the notorious Gibbs ringing artefact, which continues to prohibit realisation of the full-potential of resolution modelling in PET. Present approaches either leave this artefact in the images, or else they compromise the spatial resolution of the end-point images. This project will propose novel techniques to resolve the artefact without compromising resolution, with potential for impact beyond the medical imaging field.
