Direct attenuation correction of brain PET images using only emission data via a deep convolutional encoder-decoder (Deep-DAC).

Objective: To obtain attenuation-corrected PET images directly from non-attenuation-corrected images using a convolutional encoder-decoder network.

Methods: Brain PET images from 129 patients were evaluated. The network was designed to map non-attenuation-corrected (NAC) images to pixel-wise continuously valued measured attenuation-corrected (MAC) PET images via an encoder-decoder architecture.