Bioimpedance-based measurement method for simultaneous acquisition of respiratory and cardiac gating signals

Respiratory and cardiac motion artefacts impair the quality and reliability of medical imaging, particularly in nuclear medicine. At worst, the interpretation of distorted images may lead to inadequate or unnecessary treatment. Image artefacts can be minimized by gating the image acquisition according to respiratory phase and cardiac contractions. However, currently there are no clinically established dual-gating methods in nuclear medicine imaging. The aim of this study is to validate a previously determined optimized bioimpedance measurement configuration against traditional respiratory and cardiac measurement systems in 12 volunteers. High agreement and excellent correlations (r = 0.944-0.999) were found between respiratory peak-to-peak amplitudes as well as temporal respiratory and cardiac intervals. Above all, good quality respiratory and cardiac gating signals were obtained from all test subjects with a fairly regular sinus rhythm. Importantly, both signals were acquired simultaneously with a single device. Due to the simplicity of this inexpensive method, the technique has high potential to be adopted for dual-gating in clinical practice in the future.