Respiratory motion models: a review

The problem of respiratory motion has proved a serious obstacle in developing techniques to acquire images or guide interventions in abdominal and thoracic organs. Motion models offer a possible solution to these problems, and as a result the field of respiratory motion modelling has become an active one over the past 15 years. A motion model can be defined as a process that takes some surrogate data as input and produces a motion estimate as output. Many techniques have been proposed in the literature, differing in the data used to form the models, the type of model employed, how this model is computed, the type of surrogate data used as input to the model in order to make motion estimates and what form this output should take. In addition, a wide range of different application areas have been proposed. In this paper we summarise the state of the art in this important field and in the process highlight the key papers that have driven its advance. The intention is that this will serve as a timely review and comparison of the different techniques proposed to date and as a basis to inform future research in this area.