Evaluation of a fully 3-D BPF method for small animal PET images on MIMD architectures

Positron Emission Tomography (PET) images can be reconstructed using Fourier transform methods. This paper describes the performance of a fully 3-D Backprojection-Then-Filter (BPF) algorithm on the Gray T3E machine and on a cluster of workstations. PET reconstruction of small animals is a class of problems characterized by poor counting statistics. The low-count nature of these studies necessitates 3-D reconstruction in order to improve the sensitivity of the PET system: by including axially oblique Lines Of Response (LORs), the sensitivity of the system can be significantly improved by the 3-D acquisition and reconstruction. The BPF method is widely used in clinical studies because of its speed and easy implementation. Moreover, the BPF method is suitable for on-time 3-D reconstruction as it does not need any sinogram or rearranged data. In order to investigate the possibility of on-line processing, we reconstruct a phantom using the data stored in the list-mode format by the data acquisition system, We show how the intrinsically parallel nature of the BPF method makes it suitable for on-line reconstruction on a MIMD system such as the Gray T3E. Lastly, we analyze the performance of this algorithm on a cluster of workstations.