| PET is the gold standard for measuring myocardial perfusion in vivo. CT scans provide fast low-noise transmission maps for attenuation correction. However, single CT scans only capture a short portion of the respiratory cycle while the PET image corresponds to an average over multiple respiratory cycles. The misalignment caused by this difference leads to artifacts in the attenuation corrected image. Additionally, respiratory motion of the heart degrades image quality by blurring the acquired counts over the path of movement.;Motion blurring can be reduced through respiratory gating, which sorts the acquired counts according to the phase of the respiratory cycle. In this work, automated methods are introduced for realignment of gated emission images, and show feasibility for improving image characteristics of normal and abnormal studies. The combined effect of accurate attenuation correction approaches and respiratory phase alignment is evaluated in a series of simulated and live-subject experiments. |
