This paper deals with enhancing the formation of PET images. Physiological motion, such as breathing, may cause significant alteration of image quality. Correction methods include gated acquisitions that significantly increase the acquisition time. In this paper we propose an original method for reducing respiratory motion artefacts in PET images. It is based on synchronous acquisition of PET and CT data with a spirometer. CT images are acquired at each step of a subdivided respiratory cycle, and registered to estimate the body transformations. Then PET data is indirectly registered and corrected for attenuation before reconstructing a PET image with enhanced quality. This method has been validated using a specific phantom experimentation. Results show that the method brings improved accuracy in tumour volume representation. In addition, the PET imaging clinical protocol is unchanged: our method does not increase the acquisition time nor constrain the patient breathing.

Date Published: 19 March 2007
PDF: 9 pages
Proc. SPIE 6510, Medical Imaging 2007: Physics of Medical Imaging, 651053 (19 March 2007); doi: 10.1117/12.707915

Published in SPIE Proceedings Vol. 6510:
Medical Imaging 2007: Physics of Medical Imaging
Jiang Hsieh; Michael J. Flynn, Editor(s)