LCPR-Net: low-count PET image reconstruction using the domain transform and cycle-consistent generative adversarial networks.

Background: Reducing the radiation tracer dose and scanning time during positron emission tomography (PET) imaging can reduce the cost of the tracer, reduce motion artifacts, and increase the efficiency of the scanner. However, the reconstructed images to be noisy. It is very important to reconstruct high-quality images with low-count (LC) data. Therefore, we propose a deep learning method called LCPR-Net, which is used for directly reconstructing full-count (FC) PET images from corresponding LC sinogram data.

Methods: Based on the framework of a generative adversarial network (GAN), we enforce a cyclic consistency constraint on the least-squares loss to establish a nonlinear end-to-end mapping process from LC sinograms to FC images. In this process, we merge a convolutional neural network (CNN) and a residual network for feature extraction and image reconstruction. In addition, the domain transform (DT) operation sends a priori information to the cycle-consistent GAN (CycleGAN) network, avoiding the need for a large amount of computational resources to learn this transformation.

Results: The main advantages of this method are as follows. First, the network can use LC sinogram data as input to directly reconstruct an FC PET image. The reconstruction speed is faster than that provided by model-based iterative reconstruction. Second, reconstruction based on the CycleGAN framework improves the quality of the reconstructed image.

Conclusions: Compared with other state-of-the-art methods, the quantitative and qualitative evaluation results show that the proposed method is accurate and effective for FC PET image reconstruction.