Application of mathematical removal of positron range blurring in positron emission tomography

The range of positrons in tissue is an important limitation to the ultimate spatial resolution achievable in positron emission tomography. In this work, a Fourier deconvolution technique is applied to remove range blurring in images taken by the Donner 600-crystal positron tomograph. Using phantom data, the authors found significant improvement in the image quality and the FWHM for both /sup 68/Ga and /sup 82/Rb. These were successfully corrected so that the images and FWHM almost matched those of /sup 18/F, which has negligible positron range. However, statistical noise was increased by the deconvolution process and it was not practical to recover the full spatial resolution of the tomograph.>