System Matrix Modeling of Externally Tracked Motion

Abstract

In high resolution emission tomography imaging, even small patient movements can considerably degrade image quality. This work investigates an approach to motion compensated reconstruction of motion-contaminated data, thus applicable to any scanner in the field (e.g. without list-mode acquisition capability), assuming externally-tracked motion information; it involves incorporation of the measured motion information into the system matrix of the EM algorithm. Furthermore, it is shown that the effect of motion-contamination of the attenuation factors should also be modeled and taken into account in the reconstruction task.