Probabilistic partial volume modelling of biomedical tomographic image data

The partial volume effect is an imaging artefact associated with tomographic biomedical imaging data. Three-dimensional volumetric data points (voxels) enclose finite sized regions so that they may contain a mixture of signals which are then known as partial volume voxels. The limited spatial resolution of tomographic biomedical imaging data, due to the complex biomedical image acquisition processes, often results in large numbers of these partial volume voxels. Clinical applications of biomedical imaging data often require accurate estimates of tissues or metabolic activity, where many voxels in the data are partial volume voxels. Therefore accurate modelling of the partial volume effect can be very important for such quantitative applications.