Comparison of two elastic motion correction approaches for whole-body PET/CT: motion deblurring vs gate-to-gate motion correction

摘要

PET/CT has evolved into a very sensitive and accurate technique for tumour diagnosis and staging. The reasons for this clinical success are manifold: (1) PET/CT is a hybrid technique combining functional and anatomical imaging within a single examination, (2) there exists a broad spectrum of tumour markers such as the glucose analogon F-FDG, and (3) PET/CT is a whole-body imaging method providing information not only in the region of interest, but also in the entire body. At the same time, PET has continuously been improved from a low-sensitive 2D imaging technology with poor spatial resolution into a high-resolution 3D technique with excellent signal-to-noise (SNR) characteristics using time-of-flight (TOF) capabilities [ – ]. This enabled a significant reduction in acquisition time to few minutes per bed position. During the acquisition period, however, patient motion may influence the acquired data leading to blurring and other types of motion-related artefacts.