LAUSR

PET scanners with partial-ring geometry have been proposed for various imaging purposes. The incomplete projection data obtained from this design cause undesirable artifacts in the reconstructed images. In this study, we investigated the performance of a deep learning (DL) based method for the recovery of partial-ring PET images. Twenty digital brain phantoms were used in the Monte Carlo simulation toolkit, SimSET, to simulate 15-minute full-ring PET scans. Partial-ring PET data were generated from full-ring PET data by removing coincidence events that hit these specific detector blocks. A convolutional neural network based on the residual U-Net architecture was trained to predict full-ring data from partial-ring data in either the projection or image domain. The performance of the proposed DL-based method was evaluated by comparing with the PET images reconstructed using the full-ring projection data in terms of the mean squared error (MSE), structural similarity (SSIM) index and recovery coefficient (RC). The MSE results showed the superiority of the image-domain approach in reduction of 91.7% in contrast to 14.3% for the projection-domain approach. Therefore, the image-domain approach was used to study the influence of the number of detector block removal. The SSIM results were 0.998, 0.996 and 0.993 for 3, 5 and 7 detector block removals, respectively. The activity of gray and white matters could be fully recovered even with 7 detector block removal, while the RCs of two artificially inserted small lesions (3 pixels in diameter) in the testing data were 94%, 89% and 79% for 3, 5, and 7 detector block removals, respectively. Our simulation results suggest that DL has the potential to recover partial-ring PET images.