Comparison of Lesion Detection and Quantification in MAP Reconstruction with Gaussian and Non-Gaussian Priors

Statistical image reconstruction methods based on maximum a posteriori (MAP) principle have been developed for emission tomography. The prior distribution of the unknown image plays an important role in MAP reconstruction. The most commonly used prior are Gaussian priors, whose logarithm has a quadratic form. Gaussian priors are relatively easy to analyze. It has been shown that the effect of a Gaussian prior can be approximated by linear...