Multigrid Wavelet-Based Natural Pixel Method for Image Reconstruction in Emission Computed Tomography

We describe a multigrid wavelet-based natural pixel (WNP) method for image reconstruction in emission computed tomography (ECT). The ECT is used to identify the tagged radioactive material's position in the body for detection of abnormal tissue such as tumor or cancer, as in SPECT and PET. With ECT methodology in parallel beam mode, we formulate a matrix-based reconstruction method for radionuclide sources in the human body. The resulting matrix for a practical problem is very large and nearly singular. To overcome this ill-conditioning, wavelet transform is considered in this study. Wavelets have inherent de-noising and multiscale resolution properties. Therefore, the multigrid wavelet-based natural pixel (WNP) method is very efficient to reconstruct image from projection data that is noisy and incomplete. We test this multigrid wavelet natural pixel (WNP) reconstruction method with the MCNP generated projection data for diagnosis of the simulated cancerous tumor.