Markerless motion estimation for motion-compensated clinical brain imaging.

Markerless motion estimation for motion-compensated clinical brain imaging. Phys Med Biol. 2018 Apr 11;: Authors: Kyme AZ, Se S, Meikle SR, Fulton RR Abstract Motion-compensated brain imaging can dramatically reduce the artifacts and quantitative degradation associated with voluntary and involuntary subject head motion during positron emission tomography (PET), single photon emission computed tomography (SPECT) and computed tomography (CT). However, motion-compensated imaging protocols are not in widespread clinical use for these modalities. A key reason for this seems to be the lack of a practical motion tracking technology allowing for smooth and reliable integration of motion-compensated imaging protocols in the clinical setting. We address this problem by investigating the feasibility of a highly versatile optical motion tracking method for PET, SPECT and CT geometries. The method requires no attached markers, relying exclusively on the detection and matching of distinctive facial features. We studied the accuracy of this method in 16 volunteers in a mock imaging scenario by comparing the estimated motion with an accurate marker-based method used in applications such as image guided surgery. A range of techniques to optimize performance of the method were also studied. Our results show that the markerless motion tracking method is highly accurate (< 2 mm discrepancy against a benchmarking system) on an ethnically diverse r...
Source: Physics in Medicine and Biology - Category: Physics Authors: Tags: Phys Med Biol Source Type: research