Postprocessing method for spatially variant point spread function compensation

In medical imaging such as Single Photon Emission Computed Tomography (SPECT), the point spread function (PSF) of the system is spatially variant. The current method of compensation is to model the PSF in the iterative reconstruction process of the image itself. However, this can be quite computationally expensive and may require a large amount of time to process on readily available computers at non-research hospitals. Possible approaches to speeding up this process have focused on using clusters of parallel computers or high speed graphic boards. Rather than simply relying on increases in computational power, this paper instead proposes a postprocessing method to compensate for the spatially variant PSF. First, the raw reconstructed image (without PSF compensation and thus requiring much less computational burden to compute) is furtherblurred with a spatially variant kernel in order to produce an image with a spatially invariant PSF.