MR-guided image enhancement for whole-brain low-dose PET/MR imaging using spatial brain transformation

Motivation: The PET/MR system provides precise anatomical and functional information for neurological disorder detection. Goal(s): To mitigate quality degradation caused by reduced radiation exposure of radiopharmaceuticals. Approach: We proposed a 3D network with spatial brain transformation for whole-brain low-dose PET/MR imaging. Results: The obtained PSNR and SSIM were 41.96 ± 4.91 dB (p<0.01) and 0.9654 ± 0.0215 (p<0.01), which achieved 19% and 20% improvement, respectively. The VOI analysis of brain regions showed more accurate standardized uptake value distributions. In the future, we hope to apply our method to other multimodal systems, such as PET/CT, to assist clinical brain disease diagnosis and treatment. Impact: (1) Our approach employs multimodal information fusion to enhance low dose PET/MR whole-brain imaging. (2) Our method considers spatial brain anatomical alignment information, ensuring the consistency and accuracy of imaging data within brain regions.