Negative binomial maximum likelihood expectation maximization (NB-MLEM) algorithm for reconstruction of pre-corrected PET data

Purpose: Positron emission tomography (PET) image reconstruction is usually performed using maximum like-lihood (ML) iterative reconstruction methods, under the assumption of Poisson distributed data. Pre-correcting raw measured counts, this assumption is no longer realistic. The goal of this work is to develop a reconstruction algorithm based on the Negative Binomial (NB) distribution, which can generalize over the Poisson distribution in case of over-dispersion of raw data, that may occur if sinogram pre-correction is used.