Abstract
Objective:Respiratory motion can degrade PET image quality and lead to inaccurate quantification of lesion uptake. Such motion can be mitigated via respiratory gating. Our objective was to evaluate a data-driven gating (DDG) technique that is being developed commercially for clinical PET/CT.Methods:A data-driven respiratory gating algorithm based on principal component analysis (PCA) was applied to phantom and FDG patient data. An anthropomorphic phantom and a NEMA IEC Body phantom were filled with 18F, placed on a respiratory motion platform, and imaged using a PET/CT scanner. Motion waveforms were measured using an infrared camera [the Real-time Position Management™ system (RPM)] and also extracted from the PET data using the DDG algorithm. The waveforms were compared via calculation of Pearson’s correlation coefficients. PET data were reconstructed using quiescent period gating (QPG) and compared via measurement of recovery percentage and background variability.Results:Data-driven gating had similar performance to the external gating system, with correlation coefficients in excess of 0.97. Phantom and patient images were visually clearer with improved contrast when QPG was applied as compared to no motion compensation. Recovery coefficients in the phantoms were not significantly different between DDG- and RPM-based QPG, but were significantly higher than those found for no motion compensation (p < 0.05).Conclusion:A PCA-based DDG algorithm was evaluated and found to provide a reliable respiratory gating signal in anthropomorphic phantom studies and in example patients.Advances in knowledge:The prototype commercial DDG algorithm may enable reliable respiratory gating in routine clinical PET-CT.
Highlights
Respiratory motion can significantly degrade PET image quality
The aim of the current investigation is to evaluate a data-driven gating (DDG) algorithm based on principal component analysis (PCA) which is currently being developed by GE for routine clinical use.[9,10]
A coronal slice from each patient is presented. For both the Abdo-Man and NEMA IEC Body Phantom, the gating traces produced by the DDG algorithm were in excellent visual agreement with those measured using the Real-time Position ManagementTM system (RPM) system and with the waveform used to drive the platform
Summary
Respiratory motion can significantly degrade PET image quality. Respiratory gating can be used to lessen the effect of motion, but requires acquisition of a gating signal.[1,2] Such signals can be obtained from external devices such as a video camera or pressure belt; these may be inconvenient or unavailable, but have been used with some success.[3,4] A gating signal can be extracted directly from the acquired projection data using a variety of methods, commonly referred to as data-driven gating (DDG).[5,6,7,8,9,10,11,12,13,14,15,16,17,18,19,20,21] The aim of the current investigation is to evaluate a DDG algorithm based on principal component analysis (PCA) which is currently being developed by GE for routine clinical use.[9,10] The evaluation is based on data from phantom experiments complemented by two patient examples
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