List-Mode Affine Rebinning for Respiratory Motion Correction in PET Cardiac Imaging

Positron Emission Tomography (PET) is an established functional imaging modality but its practical deployment is hampered by motion artefacts. This paper proposes a method for correcting reconstructed PET images through a list-mode rebinning process. Respiratory motion is compensated for by applying 2D affine transforms to the respiratory gated sequence of line-of-response events prior to image reconstruction. The affine transforms are derived from a non-rigid 3D/3D registration model derived from retrospectively gated MRI acquisitions of the same patient with free-breathing. The proposed motion correction scheme is evaluated with a simulation framework where the improvement in image quality is assessed by using data acquired from 10 normal subjects.

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