Advances in Image Reconstruction for Nuclear Medicine Tomography

PET and SPECT imaging are well-established techniques in patient care with their applications being expanded in new areas of diagnostics and therapeutics. Image quality and fidelity is affected by external or intrinsic factors, such as patient physiological functions or system limitations. The image reconstruction stage is one of the domains where these signal degradations can be addressed and rectified. The field of image reconstruction in nuclear medicine is constantly evolving, incorporating the newest techniques and developments on PET and SPECT radionuclides, novel hardware, and advances on computational methodologies in order to fully exploit the opportunities arising from these advancements.

This Research Topic will explore advances in the field of image reconstruction for tomographic nuclear medicine imaging. We encourage contributions on new reconstruction techniques and also welcome clinical evaluations and translations of existing reconstruction techniques. For most novel algorithms, few clinical studies evaluating their benefit for specific applications have been made. An example is the incorporation of the point spread function within the reconstruction algorithm, which although it is now available on most clinical systems, still faces controversies for lymphoma and myocardial perfusion imaging. Another example is the use of regularized image reconstruction using advanced prior information, both spatially and temporally, such as anatomical priors from MRI or CT data or dual tracer priors from emission data. New system designs often require new reconstruction algorithms. For instance, the benefit of high resolution detector designs has been shown to be small unless patient motion correction is taken into account. Total-Body PET scanners allow reconstruction of a higher quality image and the acquisition of dynamics of the tracer distribution across the whole body over time but the large data size requires special handling during image reconstruction. Other examples of new system designs include high resolution time of flight, depth of interaction and energy measurement. Further research in the field is called to advance these methodologies, with a particular emphasis on their impact on the quantitative nature of nuclear medicine.

In this Research Topic of Frontiers in Nuclear Medicine, we welcome manuscripts focused but not limited to the following themes in the fields of oncology, cardiovascular or inflammation / infection diseases:
• Evaluation and optimization of recent methods for specific applications
• Reconstruction algorithms for dual-tracer imaging
• Total-Body PET reconstruction
• 4D reconstruction of dynamic data
• Motion Compensated image reconstruction
• Machine learning aided reconstruction
• Reconstruction methods for new system designs
• Software solutions for image reconstruction implementation and evaluation

Keywords: PET, SPECT, reconstruction, multimodality, molecular imaging

Important note: All contributions to this Research Topic must be within the scope of the section and journal to which they are submitted, as defined in their mission statements. Frontiers reserves the right to guide an out-of-scope manuscript to a more suitable section or journal at any stage of peer review.