Study of multispectral convolution scatter correction in high resolution PET

PET images acquired with a high resolution scanner based on arrays of small discrete detectors are obtained at the cost of low sensitivity and increased detector scatter. It has been postulated that these limitations can be overcome by using enlarged discrimination windows to include more low energy events and by developing more efficient energy-dependent methods to correct for scatter. In this work, we investigate one such method based on the frame-by-frame scatter correction of multispectral data. Images acquired in the conventional, broad and multispectral window modes were processed by the stationary and nonstationary consecutive convolution scatter correction methods. Broad and multispectral window acquisition with a low energy threshold of 129 keV improved system sensitivity by up to 75% relative to conventional window with a ~350 keV threshold. The degradation of image quality due to the added scatter events can almost be fully recovered by the subtraction-restoration scatter correction. The multispectral method was found to be more sensitive to the nonstationarity of scatter and its performance was not as good as that of the broad window. It is concluded that new scatter degradation models and correction methods need to be established to fully take advantage of multispectral data.Anglai

Occurrence, distribution and distinctive morphological traits of weedy Helianthus annuus L. populations in Spain and France

Contact: [email protected] audienceWe made a first descriptive study of weedy sunflowers infesting sunflower crop fields in one Spanish and three French regions. Overall, weedy sunflowers affected around 15% of sunflower fields. Infested fields were most often dispersed over the study areas without evident geographical clustering. In France, five weedy populations were surveyed more intensively. They were composed of a large diversity of morphotypes showing a combination of typical wild and domesticated traits in proportions that differed between populations. Yield losses reached 50% in heavily infested patches. Our results suggest that weedy sunflowers may have arisen through the hybridization of cultivated and wild sunflower, potentially during the seed production process. Such crop-wild hybrids would have been introduced recurrently into fields through the seed lots, where they evolved to locally invasive weedy population