Activity-dependent, spatially-varying regularization parameter design for regularized image reconstruction

Abstract

A method and apparatus is provided to iteratively reconstruct an image from gamma-ray emission data by optimizing an objective function with a spatially-varying regularization term. The image is reconstructed using a regularization term that varies spatially based on an activity-level map to spatially vary the regularization term in the objective function. For example, more smoothing (or less edge-preserving) can be imposed where the activity is lower. The activity-level map can be used to calculate a spatially-varying smoothing parameter and/or spatially-varying edge-preserving parameter. The smoothing parameter can be a regularization parameter β that scales/weights the regularization term relative to a data fidelity term of the objective function, and the regularization parameter β can depend on a sensitivity parameter. The edge-preserving parameter β can control the shape of a potential function that is applied as a penalty in the regularization term of the objective function.