Seminar

Medical Physics Seminar – Monday, April 16, 2012

Novel Denoising Methods for Improving Dynamic Positron Emission Tomography

John Floberg (student of Dr. Charles Mistretta)
Research Assistant, Department of Medical Physics, UW-School of Medicine & Public Health, Madison, WI - USA -

Dynamic positron emission tomography (PET) can provide unique and quantitative insight into physiological processes in vivo, endowing it with great clinical and research potential. However, it is beset by noise because of the finite duration of time frames and the limited amount of radiation that can be administered to patients. Noise affects both the quality of dynamic PET images and the quantitative analysis of the data, and methods that reduce noise without altering the signal, thus preserving the quantitative information in the data, would be of great value. The aim of my work is to develop and evaluate two denoising methods that use spatial and temporal correlations in dynamic PET data to reduce noise while minimally altering the underlying signal: highly constrained back-projection local-reconstruction (HYPR-LR) and spatiotemporal expectation-maximization (STEM) filtering. These methods may prove particularly valuable for improving voxel-based analysis, high resolution dynamic PET scanning, reducing radiation dose to sensitive patient populations, and improving the imaging of tracers limited by dosimetry, such as those labeled with iodine-124.

Location: 1325 (HSLC) Health Sciences Learning Center, 750 Highland Avenue, Madison, WI 53705

Time: 4:00pm-5:00pm