Seminars in nuclear medicine
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Positron emission tomography (PET) image quality is limited by patient motion. Emission data are blurred owing to cardiac and/or respiratory motion. Although spatial resolution is 4 mm for standard clinical whole-body PET scanners, the effective resolution can be as low as 1 cm owing to motion. ⋯ In this report, we present MR imaging techniques to acquire dynamic images, a nonrigid image registration algorithm to extract motion fields from acquired MR images, and a PET reconstruction algorithm with motion correction. We also present results from both phantom and in vivo animal PET/MR studies. We demonstrate that MR-based PET motion correction using simultaneous PET/MR improves image quality and lesion detectability compared with gating and no motion correction.