Nuclear Medicine (NM) imaging serves as a powerful diagnostic tool for imaging of biochemical and physiological processes in vivo. The degradation in spatial image resolution caused by the often irregular respiratory motion must be corrected to achieve high resolution imaging. In order perform motion correction more accurately, it is proposed that patient motion obtained from 4D MRI can be used to analyse respiratory motion. To extract motion from the dynamic MRI dataset an organ wise intensity based affine registration framework is proposed and evaluated. Comparison of the resultant motion obtained within selected organs is made against an open source free form deformation algorithm. For validation, the correlation of the results of both techniques to a previous study of motion in 20 patients is found. Organwise affine registration correlates very well (r≈0:9) with a previous study (Segars et al., 2007)¹ whilst free form deformation shows little correlation (r ≈ 0:3). This increases the confidence of the organ wise affine registration framework being an effective tool to extract motion from dynamic anatomical datasets.

Date Published: 13 March 2013
PDF: 6 pages
Proc. SPIE 8669, Medical Imaging 2013: Image Processing, 866930 (13 March 2013); doi: 10.1117/12.2006861

Published in SPIE Proceedings Vol. 8669:
Medical Imaging 2013: Image Processing
Sebastien Ourselin; David R. Haynor, Editor(s)