Direct Estimation of Attenuation Information from Sinograms for Positron Emission Tomography Reconstruction

Abstract

Positron Emission Tomography (PET) is a powerful imaging modality for assessing biochemical processes within the body. However, accurate image reconstruction is challenged by photon attenuation, particularly in dense structures such as bones, leading to quantification errors and reduced diagnostic confidence. Computed Tomography (CT) based attenuation correction is the standard approach but introduces additional radiation exposure, longer imaging times, and patient inconvenience, as well as potential registration errors, motion artifacts, and energy scaling inaccuracies.

In this study, we propose a 3D U-Net based deep learning framework that directly estimates attenuation information from PET sinograms, eliminating the need for additional imaging modalities. Our approach integrates PET physics and employs custom skip connections to enhance cross-domain learning. We evaluate our model on a simulated brain dataset derived from real patient templates, achieving a Dice coefficient of 0.650 and an accuracy of 0.486 for bone structures. The clinical applicability of our method is further assessed by reconstructing PET images with the generated attenuation maps, yielding an MSE of 0.007 and an SSIM of 0.956, demonstrating strong structural consistency with CT-based attenuation correction. These results highlight the feasibility of performing PET image attenuation correction using PET sinograms alone, offering a promising alternative that reduces imaging time, radiation exposure, and patient burden while enabling faster and more efficient PET reconstruction.