Methods for estimating full width at half maximum
摘要
Background: Measurement of full width at half maximum (FWHM) is used in multiple important applications related to the evaluation of the image resolution and the performance assessment of different scanner devices especially in positron emission tomography (PET) imaging, but little research has been performed about different methods for estimating FWHM.Materials and methods: We study seven different methods for estimating FWHM, including measuring FWHM according to its definition, four methods based on estimation of the standard deviation, the standard method of National Electrical Manufacturers Association (NEMA), and a new method utilizing an optimization algorithm to fit a Gaussian curve to the data. We compare their performance with several simulations. We also apply these techniques on two real data sets created by PET images of an