Simultaneous reconstruction and motion estimation for gated cardiac ECT

The focus of this work has been to develop a processing method for gated cardiac ECT that simultaneously reconstructs the pixel intensities of the gated images and estimates the motion of the cardiac wall. The simultaneous reconstruction and motion estimation is achieved using conjugate gradient optimization with an objective function that is dependent on the gated reconstructed image at two frames and the estimated motion of each image pixel. The method was tested on simulated phantom data and patient gated cardiac SPECT data. The results demonstrate the ability of the algorithm to produce quality reconstructions and accurate motion estimates. The results also demonstrate the effect of the hyperparameter selection.