Improvement of motion artifacts using dynamic whole-body ¹⁸F-FDG PET/CT imaging

Serial dynamic whole-body PET imaging is valuable for assessing serial changes in tracer uptake. The purpose of this study was to evaluate the improvement of motion artifacts in patients using serial dynamic whole-body ¹⁸F-fluorodeoxyglyucose (FDG) PET/CT imaging.

In 797 consecutive patients, serial 3-min dynamic whole-body FDG PET imaging was performed seven times, at 60 or 90 min after FDG administration. In cases with large body motion during imaging, we tried to improve the images by summing the images before body motion. An image quality study was performed on another 50 patients without obvious body motion using the same acquisition mode.

Obvious body movement was observed in 106 of 797 cases (13.3%), and severe motion artifacts which interfered image interpretation were observed in 18 (2.3%). In these 18 cases, summation of the images before the body movement enabled us to obtain images that excluded the effect of the body motion. In the visual evaluation of the image quality in another 50 patients studied, acceptable image quality was obtained when 2 or more times the serial 3-min image data were added.

Serial dynamic whole-body FDG PET imaging can minimize body motion artifacts by summation of the images before the body motion. Such serial dynamic study may be a choice for PET imaging to eliminate motion artifacts.