The SNR of time-of-flight positron emission tomography data for joint reconstruction of the activity and attenuation images.


We show that if two different TOF-kernels are equivalent for image reconstruction with
known attenuation, then they are also equivalent for joint reconstruction of the activity
and the attenuation images. The variance increase in the activity, caused by also jointly
reconstructing the attenuation image, vanishes when the TOF-resolution approaches per-
fection. Significance. These results are of interest for PET detector development and for
the development of stand-alone PET systems.