Document Type

Article

Publication Date

2-1-2009

Abstract

Motion of patients undergoing cardiac SPECT perfusion imaging causes artifacts in the acquired images which may lead to difficulty in interpretation. Our work investigates a technique of obtaining patient motion estimates from retro-reflective markers on stretchy bands wrapped around the chest and abdomen of patients being imaged clinically. Motion signals obtained from the markers consist of at least two components, body motion (BM) and periodic motion (PM) due to respiration. We present a method for separating these components from the motion-tracking data of each marker, and then report a method for combining the BM estimated from chest markers to estimate the 6-degree-of-freedom (6-DOF) rigid-body motion (RBM) of the heart. Motion studies of volunteers and patients are used to evaluate the methods. Illustrative examples of the motion of the heart due to patient body movement and respiration (upward creep) are presented and compared to estimates of the motion of the heart obtained directly from SPECT data. Our motion-tracking method is seen to give reasonable agreement with the motion-estimates from the SPECT data while being considerably less noisy. © 2006 IEEE.

Publication Source (Journal or Book title)

IEEE Transactions on Nuclear Science

First Page

147

Last Page

155

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