Patent ID: 8552387

Claim:
A method for determining radiation attenuation by an examination object in a positron emission tomography scanner, the method comprising: fixing an initial segmentation of the examination object, an attenuation coefficient being assigned to each segment of the segmentation and each segment including one or more pixels of the examination object; automatically acquiring raw radiation data about the examination object with the aid of the positron emission tomography scanner, a positron emission source being arranged in the positron emission tomography scanner; automatically determining a correction factor for each of the one or more pixels of each segment with the aid of an optimization method, a probability of the acquired raw radiation data being optimized by taking into account the segmentation and the attenuation coefficients assigned to the segments; automatically determining a statistical parameter of the correction factors for each segment, wherein the statistical parameter of a segment is determined by the correction factors that are assigned to the one or more pixels of each segment; automatically correcting the segmentation by subdividing each respective segment as a function of the statistical parameter determined for the respective segment; and automatically correcting the attenuation coefficients assigned to the segments as a function of the correction factors assigned to the respective segment.