Evaluation of Geometrical Sensitivity for Respiratory Motion Gating by GATE and NCAT Simulation

Respiratory motion artifacts can be a significant factor that limits the PET image quality. To improve image quality, surveillance systems have been developed to track the movements of the subject during scanning. Gating techniques utilizing the tracking information, are able to compensate for subject motion, thereby improving lesion detection. In this paper, we present a gating method that utilizes the geometric sensitivity gating (GSG) of a 3D-PET scanner system operating in list event acquisition mode. GSG method has several advantages over the existing methods, it only uses LOR events and is non-invasive, no additional hardware device is required and there is no additional patient preparation required. Using GATE (GEANT4 Application Tomographic Emission) and NCAT (NURBs(Non Uniform Rational B-Splines) Cardiac Torso) software packages with an Allegro PET configuration, realistic simulations of respiratory motion demonstrate that GSG can be used for respiratory gating.

[1]  R. Huesman,et al.  Fine-scale motion detection using intrinsic list mode PET information , 2001, Proceedings IEEE Workshop on Mathematical Methods in Biomedical Image Analysis (MMBIA 2001).

[2]  C. L. Le Rest,et al.  Validation of a Monte Carlo simulation of the Philips Allegro/GEMINI PET systems using GATE , 2006, Physics in medicine and biology.

[3]  M Alber,et al.  An algorithm for automatic determination of the respiratory phases in four-dimensional computed tomography. , 2006, Physics in medicine and biology.

[4]  Moshi Geso,et al.  The Application of GATE and NCAT to Respiratory Motion Simulation in Allegro PET , 2006, 2006 IEEE Nuclear Science Symposium Conference Record.

[5]  K. Langen,et al.  Organ motion and its management. , 2001, International journal of radiation oncology, biology, physics.