Patent Document ID: 9928617
Application ID: 14440981
Patent Status: 1

Claim One:
1. A method for correcting attenuation of positron emission tomography (PET) image data using magnetic resonance (MR) imaging data, the method comprising the steps of: a) acquiring PET sinogram data of a subject; b) acquiring MR image data of the subject that is registered with respect to the PET sinogram data; c) producing, using the PET sinogram data and MR image data, an estimate attenuation sinogram using a data consistency condition and joint entropy based prior by (i) deriving a prior probability density function (PDF) using the PET sinogram data, (ii) incorporating the MR image data into the prior PDF through an information theoretic similarity metric between the PET sinogram data and the MR image data by forward projecting the MR image data into MR sinogram data and defining the information theoretic similarity metric as feature vectors between the MR sinogram data and the PET sinogram data, and (iii) applying a joint entropy condition between the feature vectors extracted from the MR sinogram data and the PET sinogram data as a prior term in a Bayesian framework; and d) reconstructing a PET image using the estimated attenuation sinogram.