Enhancing ejection fraction measurement through 4D respiratory motion compensation in cardiac PET imaging

Abstract

ECG gated cardiac PET imaging measures functional parameters such as left ventricle (LV) ejection fraction (EF), providing diagnostic and prognostic information for management of patients with coronary artery disease (CAD). Respiratory motion degrades spatial resolution and affects the accuracy in measuring the LV volumes for EF calculation. The goal of this study is to systematically investigate the effect of respiratory motion correction on the estimation of end-diastolic volume (EDV), end-systolic volume (ESV), and EF, especially on the separation of normal and abnormal EFs. We developed a respiratory motion incorporated 4D PET image reconstruction technique which uses all gated-frame data to acquire a motion-suppressed image. Using the standard XCAT phantom and two individual-specific volunteer XCAT phantoms, we simulated dual-gated myocardial perfusion imaging data for normally and abnormally beating hearts. With and without respiratory motion correction, we measured the EDV, ESV, and EF from the cardiac-gated reconstructed images. For all the phantoms, the estimated volumes increased and the biases significantly reduced with motion correction compared with those without. Furthermore, the improvement of ESV measurement in the abnormally beating heart led to better separation of normal and abnormal EFs. The simulation study demonstrated the significant effect of respiratory motion correction on cardiac imaging data with motion amplitude as small as 0.7 cm. The larger the motion amplitude the more improvement respiratory motion correction brought about on the EF measurement. Using data-driven respiratory gating, we also demonstrated the effect of respiratory motion correction on estimating the above functional parameters from list mode patient data. Respiratory motion correction has been shown to improve the accuracy of EF measurement in clinical cardiac PET imaging.

MR-based cardiac and respiratory motion correction of PET: application to static and dynamic cardiac 18F-FDG imaging

“…Motion correction of cardiac PET has been an area of active research for more than two decades , Le Meunier et al 2011, Dawood et al 2013, Lamare et al 2014, Slomka et al 2015b, Yu et al 2016 (see reviews in Rahmim et al (2013) and Slomka et al (2015a)). It is hoped that artifact-free PET images will translate into more accurate assessment of myocardial perfusion, metabolism and cardiac function, leading to improved diagnosis and staging of cardiovascular diseases (Tang et al 2017. For studies performed on standalone PET or PET/CT systems, motion has generally been tackled using the following multistep framework: First, the measured emission data are gated, i.e.…”

Rotating and stationary SPECT system patient motion myocardial perfusion artifacts

“…Even in patients with no overt motion, accurate quantitation of perfusion and function from cardiac PET data improves with the application of corrections not only for cardiac contraction but also for respiratory motion, an approach that has received considerable attention. 9 It can be anticipated that corrections for both types of motion will also benefit the accuracy of parameters quantified from image data acquired by stationary SPECT systems.…”