Joint estimation of activity, attenuation and motion in respiratory-self-gated time-of-flight PET

Objective. Whole-body positron emission tomography (PET) imaging is often hindered by respiratory motion during acquisition, causing significant degradation in the quality of reconstructed activity images. An additional challenge in PET/CT imaging arises from the respiratory phase mismatch between CT-based attenuation correction and PET acquisition, leading to attenuation artifacts. To address these issues, we propose two new, purely data-driven methods for the joint estimation of activity, attenuation, and motion in respiratory self-gated time-of-flight PET. These methods enable the reconstruction of a single activity image free from motion and attenuation artifacts.Approach. The proposed methods were evaluated using data from the anthropomorphic Wilhelm phantom acquired on a Siemens mCT PET/CT system, as well as three clinical [¹⁸F]FDG PET/CT datasets acquired on a GE DMI PET/CT system. Image quality was assessed visually to identify motion and attenuation artifacts. Lesion uptake values were quantitatively compared across reconstructions without motion modeling, with motion modeling but 'static' attenuation correction, and with our proposed methods.Main results. For the Wilhelm phantom, the proposed methods delivered image quality closely matching the reference reconstruction from a static acquisition. The lesion-to-background contrast for a liver dome lesion improved from 2.0 (no motion correction) to 5.2 (using our proposed methods), matching the contrast from the static acquisition (5.2). In contrast, motion modeling with 'static' attenuation correction yielded a lower contrast of 3.5. In patient datasets, the proposed methods successfully reduced motion artifacts in lung and liver lesions and mitigated attenuation artifacts, demonstrating superior lesion to background separation.Significance. Our proposed methods enable the reconstruction of a single, high-quality activity image that is motion-corrected and free from attenuation artifacts, without the need for external hardware.