Joint cardiac and respiratory motion estimation for motion-corrected cardiac PET-MR.

Joint cardiac and respiratory motion estimation for motion-corrected cardiac PET-MR. Phys Med Biol. 2018 Dec 19;64(1):015007 Authors: Kolbitsch C, Neji R, Fenchel M, Schuh A, Mallia A, Marsden P, Schaeffter T Abstract Respiratory and cardiac motion can strongly impair cardiac PET image quality and tracer uptake quantification. Standard gating techniques can minimize these motion artefacts but suffer from low signal-to-noise ratio because only a small percentage of the total data is utilized. Motion correction approaches have been proposed to overcome this problem but require accurate knowledge of such physiological motion. Here we present a joint PET-MR motion estimation approach which combines complimentary dynamic image information from simultaneously acquired MR and PET to ensure improved cardiac and respiratory motion estimation for motion-corrected image reconstruction (MCIR) of PET images. A 3D triple-echo Dixon MR scan is used both for calculation of MR-based attenuation correction (AC) maps and estimation of physiological motion. PET listmode data is obtained simultaneously to the MR acquisition which is used for a joint motion estimation and reconstruction of the final MCIR PET. In a first step, dynamic cardiac and respiratory motion resolved 4D MR and PET images are reconstructed. These image series are used in a joint image registration to estimate non-rigid cardiac and respiratory motion fields. In a second step, the moti...
Source: Physics in Medicine and Biology - Category: Physics Authors: Tags: Phys Med Biol Source Type: research