Performance of MAP Reconstruction for Hot Lesion Detection in Whole-Body PET/CT: An Evaluation With Human and Numerical Observers

For positron emission tomography (PET) imaging, different reconstruction methods can be applied, including maximum likelihood (ML ) and maximum a posteriori (MAP) reconstruction. Postsmoothed ML images have approximately position and object independent spatial resolution, which is advantageous for (semi-) quantitative analysis. However, the complex object dependent smoothing obtained with MAP might yield improved noise characteristics,...