Abstract
The time-of-flight (TOF) positron emission tomography(PET) system can provide not only high spatial resolution in functional image as conventional PET but high time resolution. High time resolution provides the measurement ability of time difference of annihilation photon pair reach detector. The characteristic can improve image quality. In TOF PET imaging, the measurement data contain spatial and temporal information. TOF PET image reconstruction takes consequently more time than conventional PET. In this study, we contributed a two-dimension statistical model for TOF data. We also developed a fast TOF iterative image reconstruction algorithm to improve low convergence rate of TOF image reconstruction. The results of experiments show that TOF reconstruction can obtain higher signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) and higher contrast recovery rate than conventional PET. The fast TOF iterative image reconstruction we derived have faster convergent rate than conventional one. In conclusion, the TOF PET fast iterative method we derived can achieve the acceleration of image reconstruction without spoiling high image quality characteristics of TOF PET.