Evaluation of penalty design in penalized maximum-likelihood image reconstruction for lesion detection

Detecting cancerous lesions is a major clinical application in emission tomography. Previously, we developed a method to design a shift-variant quadratic penalty function in penalized maximum-likelihood (PML) image reconstruction to improve the lesion detectability. We used a multiview channelized Hotelling observer (mvCHO) to assess the lesion detectability in three-dimensional images and validated the penalty design using computer simulations....