Abstract
Animal PET system has become a powerful tool in preclinical imaging applications. In order to improve sensitivity and the counting rate, animal PET systems usually acquire data in fully three dimension mode. Due to the huge amount of 3D data, the computation for 3D reconstruction takes longer. Although rebinning algorithms could reduce the computation time by converting 3D data into 2D, it is believed that fully 3D can preserve the information, and lead to better image quality. In this study, we modified an inverse rebinning (FORE) algorithm to simulate the 3D forward and backward projections that are required in the fully 3D reconstructions. To evaluate the performance of the proposed method, data from animal PET from NEMA phantom, line source, point source and mouse were acquired and reconstructed using the proposed method, and compared to those from conventional 3D reconstruction (3DRP) and rebinning methods with 2D reconstruction. The results demonstrated that our proposed method generated similar performance in resolution with that of 3DRP reconstruction but with much less computation time. Future work will include more Monte Carlo data verification as well as comparison to full 3D reconstruction.