Elsevier

PET Clinics

Volume 2, Issue 2, April 2007, Pages 251-266
PET Clinics

Strategies for Motion Tracking and Correction in PET

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cpet.2007.08.002Get rights and content

With the arrival of increasingly higher-resolution PET systems, small amounts of motion can cause significant blurring in the resulting images compared with the intrinsic resolution of the PET scanner. The authors review advanced correction methods for unwanted patient motion and for motion due to cardiac and respiratory cycles. A general theme in motion correction methods is the use of increasingly sophisticated software to make use of existing advanced hardware. In this sense, the field is open to future novel ideas (hardware and especially software) aimed at improving motion detection, characterization, and compensation.

Section snippets

Brain PET imaging

Unlike cardiac- and respiratory-related motions, patient movements in brain imaging are assumed to be of rigid nature (ie, modeled as translational and rotational transformations only). Because a typical PET brain imaging session can last hours, it is not reasonable to expect a patient to remain motionless during this time [3]. A number of head restraints are common nowadays, such as thermoplastic masks or neoprene caps that lower the amount of motion but do not eliminate it [4]. Even with head

Motion due to the cardiac cycle

Although a spatial resolution of less than 5 mm is possible with current-generation PET scanners, the base of the heart moves 9 to 14 mm toward the apex, and the myocardial walls thicken from approximately 10 mm to over 15 mm between end-diastole and end-systole, as measured from tagged MR images [38]. Compared with the intrinsic resolution of today's scanners, cardiac motion can therefore result in significantly blurred images (Equation 1). The most common approach to cardiac cycle motions in

Motion caused by the respiratory cycle

The common approach to the problem of respiratory blurring of PET images is respiratory gating [67] (discussed later); however, two exceptions can be mentioned.

Areas of future research

In this section, several areas of research in motion correction that still remain open questions and important areas demanding further inquiries and research are outlined.

Current motion tracking devices and correction methods in brain imaging do not address the occurrence of relative motions between the skin and the skull during the scans. This can imply an inaccuracy, because motion-tracking lights or reflectors only follow the motion of the surface area to which they are attached (and not

Summary

In this article, the authors review advanced correction methods in PET for the cases of unwanted patient motion and unwanted motion due to cardiac cycles and respiratory cycles. Nearly all the work related to the first type of motion has been in brain PET imaging. The use of an external motion-tracking device (and not solely relying on the emission data) is attractive and will become popular for high-resolution PET imaging in the near future.

In brain PET imaging, given the rigid nature of

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    This work was supported by grant SNSF 3100A0-116547 from the Swiss National Foundation.

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