Patent Document ID: 8767908
Application ID: 12603031
Patent Status: 1

Claim One:
1. A medical imaging system for reconstructing a nuclear medicine image comprising: a three dimensional positron emission tomography (3D PET) scanner configured to generate 3D time of flight (TOF) PET scan data, the 3D TOF PET scan data representing a total number of photons arriving between each detector pair in the 3D PET scanner parameterized by variables that describe the spatial coordinates of lines of response, the spatial coordinates for each line of response including a transaxial radial coordinate, a transaxial angular coordinate, a tangent of an oblique angle between the line of response and a transaxial plane, an axial coordinate, and time of flight (TOF) information indicative of differences in arrival times of the photons at the detectors pairs; a computer processing system programmed with one or more algorithms configured to: rebin the 3D TOF PET scan data into a lower dimensional format having only a subset of the variables that does not include a variable representing time-of-flight information by: taking the Fourier transform of the 3D TOF PET scan data with respect to at least one of the variables that describe the spatial coordinates and the variable that describes the TOF information; applying a coordinate transformation to the Fourier transformed 3D TOF PET data to match coordinates of the Fourier transform representation of the rebinned data; computing an average of the coordinate transformed data with respect to one or more variables that are not used to represent the rebinned data; and computing an inverse Fourier transform of the averaged data; reconstruct the image from the rebinned data; and store the reconstructed image in a data storage system or display the reconstructed image on a display system.