Physics in medicine and biology
-
Dynamic PET myocardial perfusion imaging (MPI) used in conjunction with tracer kinetic modeling enables the quantification of absolute myocardial blood flow (MBF). However, MBF maps computed using the traditional indirect method (i.e. post-reconstruction voxel-wise fitting of kinetic model to PET time-activity-curves-TACs) suffer from poor signal-to-noise ratio (SNR). Direct reconstruction of kinetic parameters from raw PET projection data has been shown to offer parametric images with higher SNR compared to the indirect method. ⋯ In all cases, the direct method yielded lower noise and standard deviation than the indirect method based on OSEM. Overall, the proposed direct reconstruction offered a better bias-variance tradeoff than the indirect method applied to either OSEM and OSL-MAP. Direct parametric reconstruction as applied to in vivo dynamic PET MPI data is therefore a promising method for producing MBF maps with lower variance.