Feasibility of Total Variation Noise Reduction Algorithm According to Various MR-Based PET Images in a Simultaneous PET/MR System: A Phantom Study

Recently, the total variation (TV) algorithm has been used for noise reduction distribution in degraded nuclear medicine images. To acquire positron emission tomography (PET) to correct the attenuation region in the PET/magnetic resonance (MR) system, the MR Dixon pulse sequence, which is based on controlled aliasing in parallel imaging, results from higher acceleration (CAIPI; MR-AC(Dixon-CAIPI)) and generalized autocalibrating partially parallel acquisition (GRAPPA; MR-AC(Dixon-GRAPPA)) algorithms are used. Therefore, this study aimed to evaluate the image performance of the TV noise reduction algorithm for PET/MR images using the Jaszczak phantom by injecting (18)F radioisotopes with PET/MR, which is called mMR (Siemens, Germany), compared with conventional noise-reduction techniques such as Wiener and median filters. The contrast-to-noise (CNR) and coefficient of variation (COV) were used for quantitative analysis. Based on the results, PET images with the TV algorithm were improved by approximately 7.6% for CNR and decreased by approximately 20.0% for COV compared with conventional noise-reduction techniques. In particular, the image quality for the MR-AC(Dixon-CAIPI) PET image was better than that of the MR-AC(Dixon-GRAPPA) PET image. In conclusion, the TV noise-reduction algorithm is efficient for improving the PET image quality in PET/MR systems.