Motion-correction strategies for enhancing whole-body PET imaging

Area of Science:

• Medical Imaging
• Nuclear Medicine

Background:

• Positron Emission Tomography (PET) is crucial for disease detection and monitoring.
• Patient motion significantly degrades PET image quality and diagnostic accuracy.
• Motion artifacts compromise quantitative tracer uptake measurements.

Purpose of the Study:

• To review and outline motion gating techniques for whole-body PET imaging.
• To discuss the impact of motion correction on diagnostic and quantitative PET image quality.

Main Methods:

• Overview of hardware-driven gating approaches utilizing external motion sensors.
• Explanation of data-driven gating methods that derive motion from imaging data.
• Discussion of motion sources addressed: head, respiratory, and cardiac motion.

Main Results:

• Motion gating effectively corrects for motion artifacts in PET imaging.
• Improved accuracy in tracer uptake measurements is achieved through motion correction.
• Enhanced diagnostic and quantitative quality of whole-body PET images.

Conclusions:

• Motion gating is essential for high-quality whole-body PET imaging.
• Both hardware- and data-driven methods offer solutions to motion-related artifacts.
• Continued research in motion gating significantly impacts clinical PET applications.