Rebinning of time-of-flight Positron Emission Tomography data to no-time-of-flight

Positron Emission Tomography scanners that are capable of measuring time-of-flight (TOF) have undergone several iterations over the past 30 years. However, while there is little doubt that, theoretically, these scanners should yield improved spatial resolution, the amount of data measured are overwhelming. Thus, taking full advantage of the additional timing parameter has becomes difficult. This post highlights work done to address this issue at Dr Richard M. Leahy's laboratory at USC (Cho et al., Phys Med Biol. Feb 2009), where the Fourier re-binning technique has been used for dimensionality reduction of the TOF data to convert it to non-TOF data. This work has been short-listed in Institute of Physics' selected papers. Very promising work, to say the least.