A Mumford-Shah-type approach to simultaneous reconstruction and segmentation for emission tomography problems with Poisson statistics.

We propose a variational model to simultaneous reconstruction and segmentation in emission tomography. As in the original Mumford-Shah model [] we use the contour length as penalty term to preserve edge information whereas a different data fidelity term is used to measure the information discrimination between the computed tomography data of the reconstructed object and the observed (or simulated) data. As data fidelity term we use the Kullback-Leibler divergence which originates from the Poisson distribution present in emission tomography. In this paper we focus on piecewise constant reconstructions which is a reasonable assumption in medical imaging. The segmenting contour as well as the corresponding reconstructions are found as minimizers of a Mumford-Shah-type functional over the space of piecewise constant functions. The numerical scheme is implemented by evolving the level-set surface according to the shape derivative of the functional. The method is validated for simulated data with different levels of noise. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]