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Detection of respiratory tumour motion using intrinsic list mode-driven gating in positron emission tomography

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European Journal of Nuclear Medicine and Molecular Imaging Aims and scope Submit manuscript

Abstract

Purpose

Respiratory motion of organs during PET scans is known to degrade PET image quality, potentially resulting in blurred images, attenuation artefacts and erroneous tracer quantification. List mode-based gating has been shown to reduce these pitfalls in cardiac PET. This study evaluates these intrinsic gating methods for tumour PET scans.

Methods

A total of 34 patients with liver or lung tumours (14 liver tumours and 27 lung tumours in all) underwent a 15-min single-bed list mode PET scan of the tumour region. Of these, 15 patients (8 liver and 11 lung tumours in total) were monitored by a video camera registering a marker on the patient’s abdomen, thus capturing the respiratory motion for PET gating (video method). Further gating information was deduced by dividing the list mode stream into 200-ms frames, determining the number of coincidences (sensitivity method) and computing the axial centre of mass of the measured count rates in the same frames (centre of mass method). Additionally, these list mode-based methods were evaluated using only coincidences originating from the tumour region by segmenting the tumour in sinogram space (segmented sensitivity/centre of mass method). Measured displacement of the tumours between end-expiration and end-inspiration and the increase in apparent uptake in the gated images served as a measure for the exactness of gating. To estimate the accuracy, a thorax phantom study with moved activity sources simulating small tumours was also performed.

Results

All methods resolved the respiratory motion with varying success. The best results were seen in the segmented centre of mass method, on average leading to larger displacements and uptake values than the other methods. The simple centre of mass method performed worse in terms of displacements due to activities moving into the field of view during the respiratory cycle. Both sensitivity- and video-based methods lead to similar results.

Conclusion

List mode-driven PET gating, especially the segmented centre of mass method, is feasible and accurate in PET scans of liver and lung tumours.

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Acknowledgements

The authors thank Ulrike Althof, Rabea Berkenkopf, Anika Brunegraf, Björn Czekalla, Bertold Könemann, Anette Langnickel, Yvonne Mehlich, and Katarzyna Quirós-Hoppe for excellent technical assistance, and Bernard Bendriem, James Hamill, Judson Jones and Hartwig Newiger of Siemens Molecular Imaging (Knoxville, TN, USA and Erlangen, Germany) for valuable discussions. This study was supported by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG), Sonderforschungsbereich 656 - Molecular Cardiovascular Imaging (SFB 656 Projects B2, B3, C2 and C6) and a research grant to the European Institute for Molecular Imaging (EIMI) from Siemens Medical Solutions (Erlangen, Germany).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. European Institute for Molecular Imaging, University of Münster, Mendelstraße 11, 48149, Münster, Germany

    Florian Büther, Mohammad Dawood, Michael Schäfers & Klaus P. Schäfers

  2. Department of Radiotherapy and Radiooncology, University of Münster, Münster, Germany

    Iris Ernst & Peter Kraxner

  3. Department of Nuclear Medicine, University of Münster, Münster, Germany

    Otmar Schober

Authors
  1. Florian Büther
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  2. Iris Ernst
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  3. Mohammad Dawood
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  4. Peter Kraxner
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  5. Michael Schäfers
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  6. Otmar Schober
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  7. Klaus P. Schäfers
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Correspondence to Florian Büther.

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Büther, F., Ernst, I., Dawood, M. et al. Detection of respiratory tumour motion using intrinsic list mode-driven gating in positron emission tomography. Eur J Nucl Med Mol Imaging 37, 2315–2327 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00259-010-1533-y

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00259-010-1533-y

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