  Dynamic positron emission tomography (dPET) is currently a widely used
medical imaging technique for the clinical diagnosis, staging and therapy
guidance of all kinds of human cancers. Higher temporal imaging resolution for
the early stage of radiotracer metabolism is desired; however, in this case,
the reconstructed images with short frame durations always suffer from a
limited image signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) and unsatisfactory image spatial
resolution. The appearance of uEXPLORER (United Imaging Healthcare, Inc.) with
higher PET imaging sensitivity and resolution may help solving this problem. In
this work, based on dynamic PET data acquired by uEXPLORER, we proposed a dPET
processing method that denoises images with short frame durations via
pixel-level time-activity curve (TAC) correction based on third-order Hermite
interpolation (Pitch-In). The proposed method was validated and compared to
several state-of-the-art methods to demonstrate its superior performance in
terms of high temporal resolution dPET image noise reduction and imaging
contrast. Higher stability and feasibility of the proposed Pitch-In method for
future clinical application with high temporal resolution (HTR) dPET imaging
can be expected.
