McQuaid, S.; (2010) Characterisation and correction of respiratory-motion artefacts in cardiac PET-CT. Doctoral thesis , UCL (University College London).

Preview	PDF 19732.pdf Download (7MB)
	ZIP file (PowerPoint Slideshow animation files) 19732_Animation_PPS.zip Download (12MB)

Abstract

Respiratory motion during cardiac Positron Emission Tomography (PET) Computed Tomography (CT) imaging results in blurring of the PET data and can induce mismatches between the PET and CT datasets, leading to attenuation-correction artefacts. The aim of this project was to develop a method of motion-correction to overcome both of these problems. The approach implemented was to transform a single CT to match the frames of a gated PET study, to facilitate respiratory-matched attenuation-correction, without the need for a gated CT. This is benecial for lowering the radiation dose to the patient and in reducing PETCT mismatches, which can arise even in gated studies. The heart and diaphragm were identied through phantom studies as the structures responsible for generating attenuation-correction artefacts in the heart and their motions therefore needed to be considered in transforming the CT. Estimating heart motion was straight-forward, due to its high contrast in PET, however the poor diaphragm contrast meant that additional information was required to track its position. Therefore a diaphragm shape model was constructed using segmented diaphragm surfaces, enabling complete diaphragm surfaces to be produced from incomplete and noisy initial estimates. These complete surfaces, in combination with the estimated heart motions were used to transform the CT. The PET frames were then attenuation-corrected with the transformed CT, reconstructed, aligned and summed, to produce motion-free images. It was found that motion-blurring was reduced through alignment, although benets were marginal in the presence of small respiratory motions. Quantitative accuracy was improved from use of the transformed CT for attenuation-correction (compared with no CT transformation), which was attributed to both the heart and the diaphragm transformations. In comparison to a gated CT, a substantial dose saving and a reduced dependence on gating techniques were achieved, indicating the potential value of the technique in routine clinical procedures.

Download activity - last month

Export as CSVJSONXML

Download activity - last 12 months

Export as JSONXMLCSV

Downloads by country - last 12 months

Export as CSVJSONXML

Archive Staff Only

View Item