Biomedical Imaging: Principles and Applications

Chapter 2

Evaluation of Tomographic Data

Jörg van den Hoff

Department of Positron Emission Tomography, Institute of Radiopharmacy, Helmholtz-Zentrum Dresden-Rossendorf, Dresden, Germany

2.1 Introduction

Through the last decades tomographic techniques have gained an ever-increasing importance in biomedical imaging. The great benefit of these techniques is the ability to assess noninvasively (and nondestructively) the three-dimensional structure of the investigated objects.

With regards to biomedical applications, several, but not all, available tomographic techniques allow the investigation of dynamic processes (e.g., transport phenomena) and repeated measurements in a single organism. One thus can differentiate between these in vivo techniques and in vitro techniques, which are suitable, for example, for investigations of tissue samples. Electron tomography (Chapter 6) belongs to the latter group. X-ray Computed Tomography (CT, Chapter 4), Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI, Chapter 5), as well as Single Photon Emission Computed Tomography and Positron Emission Tomography (SPECT and PET, Chapter 7) are generally (SPECT and PET exclusively) used for the noninvasive 3D imaging of living organisms. The aforementioned techniques are well suited to generate three-dimensional tomographic image volumes even of complete organisms such as the human body.

This contrasts with more recent developments in the area of optical imaging such as Optical Coherence Tomography (OCT), which utilize light ...