Retrospective data-driven respiratory gating for PET/CT

Respiratory motion can adversely affect both PET and CT acquisitions. Respiratory gating allows an acquisition to be divided into a series of motion-reduced bins according to the respiratory signal, which is typically hardware acquired. In order that the effects of motion can potentially be corrected for, we have developed a novel, automatic, data-driven gating method which retrospectively derives the respiratory signal from the acquired PET and CT data. PET data are acquired in listmode and analysed in sinogram space, and CT data are acquired in cine mode and analysed in image space. Spectral analysis is used to identify regions within the CT and PET data which are subject to respiratory motion, and the variation of counts within these regions is used to estimate the respiratory signal. Amplitude binning is then used to create motion-reduced PET and CT frames. The method was demonstrated with four patient datasets acquired on a 4-slice PET/CT system. To assess the accuracy of the data-derived respiratory signal, a hardware-based signal was acquired for comparison. Data-driven gating was successfully performed on PET and CT datasets for all four patients. Gated images demonstrated respiratory motion throughout the bin sequences for all PET and CT series, and image analysis and direct comparison of the traces derived from the data-driven method with the hardware-acquired traces indicated accurate recovery of the respiratory signal.