Respiratory motion correction for PET oncology applications using affine transformation of list mode data

Respiratory motion is a source of artefacts and reduced image quality in PET. Proposed methodology for correction of respiratory effects involves the use of gated frames, which are however of low signal-to-noise ratio. Therefore a method accounting for respiratory motion effects without affecting the statistical quality of the reconstructed images is necessary. We have implemented an affine transformation of list mode data for the correction of respiratory motion over the thorax. The study was performed using datasets of the NCAT phantom at different points throughout the respiratory cycle. List mode data based PET simulated frames were produced by combining the NCAT datasets with a Monte Carlo simulation. Transformation parameters accounting for respiratory motion were estimated according to an affine registration and were subsequently applied on the original list mode data. The corrected and uncorrected list mode datasets were subsequently reconstructed using the one-pass list mode EM (OPL-EM) algorithm. Comparison of corrected and uncorrected respiratory motion average frames suggests that an affine transformation in the list mode data prior to reconstruction can produce significant improvements in accounting for respiratory motion artefacts in the lungs and heart. However, the application of a common set of transformation parameters across the imaging field of view does not significantly correct the respiratory effects on organs such as the stomach, liver or spleen.