Evaluation of penalized maximum-likelihood PET image reconstruction for ROI quantification

Region of interest (ROI) quantification is one of the important tasks in positron emission tomography (PET) imaging. Statistical reconstruction methods based on the penalized maximum-likelihood (PML) principle have been developed to improve image quality over early stopping with EM-based methods and analytic methods. The penalty function that controls spatial smoothness plays an important role in PML reconstruction. The commonly used quadratic...