Statistical reconstruction methods in the context of a Bayesian framework have played an important role in emission tomography since they allow to incorporate a priori information into the reconstruction algorithm. Given the ill-posed nature of tomographic inversion and the poor quality of projection data, the Bayesian approach uses regularizers to stabilize solutions by incorporating suitable prior models. In this work we show that, while the quantitative performance of the standard filtered backprojection (FBP) algorithm is not as good as that of Bayesian methods, the application of spline-regularized smoothing to the sinogram space can make the FBP algorithm improve its performance by inheriting the advantages of using the spline priors in Bayesian methods. We first show how to implement the spline-regularized smoothing filter by deriving mathematical relationship between the regularization and the lowpass filtering. We then compare quantitative performance of our new FBP algorithms using the quantitation of bias/variance and the total squared error (TSE) measured over noise trials. Our numerical results show that the second-order spline filter applied to FBP yields the best results in terms of TSE among the three different spline orders considered in our experiments.