Noise analysis of MAP - EM algorithms for emission tomography

The ability to theoretically model the propagation of photon noise through PET and SPECT tomographic reconstruction algorithms is crucial in evaluating the reconstructed image quality as a function of parameters of the algorithm. In a previous approach for the important case of the iterative ML - EM (maximum-likelihood - expectation-maximization) algorithm, judicious linearizations were used to model theoretically the propagation of a mean image...