Abstract
Respiratory and cardiac motion leads to image degradation in positron emission tomography (PET) studies of the human heart. In this paper we present a novel approach to motion correction based on dual gating and mass-preserving hyperelastic image registration. Thereby, we account for intensity modulations caused by the highly nonrigid cardiac motion. This leads to accurate and realistic motion estimates which are quantitatively validated on software phantom data and carried over to clinically relevant data using a hardware phantom. For patient data, the proposed method is first evaluated in a high statistic (20 min scans) dual gating study of 21 patients. It is shown that the proposed approach properly corrects PET images for dual-cardiac as well as respiratory-motion. In a second study the list mode data of the same patients is cropped to a scan time reasonable for clinical practice (3 min). This low statistic study not only shows the clinical applicability of our method but also demonstrates its robustness against noise obtained by hyperelastic regularization.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Article number | 6074945 |
| Journal | IEEE Transactions on Medical Imaging |
| Volume | 31 |
| Issue number | 3 |
| Pages (from-to) | 698-712 |
| Number of pages | 15 |
| ISSN | 0278-0062 |
| DOIs | |
| Publication status | Published - 01.03.2012 |
Funding
Manuscript received September 15, 2011; revised October 21, 2011; accepted October 31, 2011. Date of publication November 09, 2011; date of current version March 02, 2012. This work was partly funded by the Deutsche Forschungs-gemeinschaft, SFB 656 MoBil (projects B2 and B3) and projects BU2327/2-1, JU445/5-1 and WO1425/1-1. Asterisk indicates corresponding author. *F. Gigengack is with the European Institute for Molecular Imaging (EIMI) and with the Department of Mathematics and Computer Science, University of Münster, 48149 Münster, Germany (e-mail: fabian.gigengack@uni-muenster. de).
