Three-Dimensional Image Reconstruction in Radiology and Nuclear Medicine

Book excerpt: This book contains a selection of communications presented at the Third International Meeting on Fully Three-Dimensional Image Reconstruction in Radiology and Nuclear Medicine, held 4-6 July 1995 at Domaine d' Aix-Marlioz, Aix-Ies-Bains, France. This nice resort provided an inspiring environment to hold discussions and presentations on new and developing issues. Roentgen discovered X-ray radiation in 1895 and Becquerel found natural radioactivity in 1896 : a hundred years later, this conference was focused on the applications of such radiations to explore the human body. If the physics is now fully understood, 3D imaging techniques based on ionising radiations are still progressing. These techniques include 3D Radiology, 3D X-ray Computed Tomography (3D-CT), Single Photon Emission Computed Tomography (SPECT), Positron Emission Tomography (PET). Radiology is dedicated to morphological imaging, using transmitted radiations from an external X-ray source, and nuclear medicine to functional imaging, using radiations emitted from an internal radioactive tracer. In both cases, new 3D tomographic systems will tend to use 2D detectors in order to improve the radiation detection efficiency. Taking a set of 2D acquisitions around the patient, 3D acquisitions are obtained. Then, fully 3D image reconstruction algorithms are required to recover the 3D image of the body from these projection measurements.