No abstract

Considering the compensation of respiratory motion effects only, both affine and elastic based approaches led to an accurate resizing and positioning of the myocardium. The use of the diastolic phase combined with an affine model based respiratory motion correction may therefore be a simple approach leading to significant quality improvements in cardiac PET imaging. However, the best performance was obtained with the combined correction for both cardiac and respiratory movements considering all the dual-gated bins independently through the use of an elastic model based motion compensation.

In this study, the authors investigated the input activity map heterogeneity in the GATE simulations of tumors with heterogeneous activity distribution. The most realistic heterogeneous tumors were obtained by inserting PVC activity distributions from the clinical image into the activity map of the simulation. Partial volume effect (PVE) can play a crucial role in the quantification of heterogeneity within tumors and have an important impact on applications such as patient follow-up during treatment and assessment of tumor response to therapy. The development of such a database incorporating patient anatomical and functional variability can be used to evaluate new image processing or analysis algorithms, while providing control of the ground truth, which is not available when dealing with clinical datasets. The database includes all images used and generated in this study, as well as the sinograms and the attenuation phantoms for further investigation. It is freely available to the interested reader of the journal at http://www.med.upatras.gr/oncobase/.