  Improving the quality of positron emission tomography (PET) images, affected
by low resolution and high level of noise, is a challenging task in nuclear
medicine and radiotherapy. This work proposes a restoration method, achieved
after tomographic reconstruction of the images and targeting clinical
situations where raw data are often not accessible. Based on inverse problem
methods, our contribution introduces the recently developed total generalized
variation (TGV) norm to regularize PET image deconvolution. Moreover, we
stabilize this procedure with additional image constraints such as positivity
and photometry invariance. A criterion for updating and adjusting automatically
the regularization parameter in case of Poisson noise is also presented.
Experiments are conducted on both synthetic data and real patient images.
