Movement degrades image quality in PET/CT. The first step in correcting for movement is to gate the data into dif ferent motion states. The gating is usually based on information from external devices, such as the chest position for respiratory movement, or an ECG signal for cardiac gating. Various groups have proposed methods to extract a gating signal out of the PET and/or CT data. Most of these methods are slow or require prior information (and associated tuning of parameters). Here we propose and evaluate a method that uses a well-known technique for data analysis called Principal Component Analysis (PCA). We test the method on clinical PET list mode data and CINE CT images to extract a gating signal. We show good correlation with the chest position as measured by the Varian RPM system. Total processing time for PET data is less than half a minute of which most is 10 related.
I. IN TRODUCTIONIn many cases in medical imaging, motion is unavoid able. For example, in diagnostic PET, acquisition duration is currently roughly 2 minutes per bed position. Respiratory motion in patients during PET acquisition leads to blurring in the resulting (static) PET images. This may in turn lead to lower detectability of tumours, inaccurate SUV calculation, and incorrect tum or planning volumes in radiation therapy [1], [2], [3], [4]. The first step towards reducing the amount of motion in the images normally involves the use of respiratory gating [5] which results in a 4-D data set, in which multiple gates containing data from the various respiratory states, are usually individually reconstructed. This is then potentially followed by motion correction.In other applications, the different motion states are of interest, for instance in cardiac studies to find the ejection fraction [6] and/or wall motion [7], or in radio-therapy [8].The gating is usually based on information from exter nal devices, such as a spyrometer or the chest position for respiratory movement, or an ECG signal for cardiac gating. Due to the extra cost and patient management associated to the additional device, but also because of some evidence of hysteresis between the internal movement and external device [9], [10], [11], various groups have proposed methods to extract a gating signal out of the PET, SPECT and/or CT data. Many groups compute the centre-of-mass (COM) in an ROI and use this as an indicator of motion, mostly of respiration, for instance in PET [12], [13] and cardiac SPECT [14]. Filtering allows separation of a respiratory and cardiac signal in cardiac PET [15] and cone-beam CINECT [16]. These methods need a high contrast region that can be tracked over time.For PET data, Visvikis et at.[17] placed an ROI over edges of boundaries (using non-attenuation corrected images) and studied the Time Activity Curve (TACs). A characteristic frequency was derived via the Fourier Transform (FT) which then allowed finding amplitude and phase images. This method worked well on phantom data with periodic movement but was not evaluated for patients. Schleyer ...