Patent ID: 8389943

Claim:
A method for reconstructing single photon emission computed tomography data acquired with a pinhole collimator by determining point-spread-function (PSF), the method comprising: (a) sub-dividing each voxel in the imaging target object into sub-voxels; (b) sub-dividing each detector bin in the detector into sub-bins; (c) connecting centers of each of the sub-voxels to each of the detector sub-bins through a pinhole provided in the pinhole collimator by ray tracing; (d) for each ray connecting the centers of each of the sub-voxels to each of the detector sub-bins, calculating each ray's transmission probability by analytically solving the intersections between the ray and the pinhole collimator; (e) computing a geometric-response-function of the pinhole collimator; and (f) convolving the geometric-response-function of the pinhole collimator with intrinsic-response-function of the detector to obtain the PSF.