Motion correction strategies for enhancing whole-body PET imaging

Positron Emission Tomography (PET) is a powerful medical imaging modality widely used for detection and monitoring of disease. However, PET imaging can be adversely affected by patient motion, leading to degraded image quality and diagnostic capability. Hence, motion gating schemes have been developed to monitor various motion sources including head motion, respiratory motion, and cardiac motion. The approaches for these techniques have commonly come in the form of hardware-driven gating and data-driven gating, where the distinguishing aspect is the use of external hardware to make motion measurements vs. deriving these measures from the data itself. The implementation of these techniques help corrects for motion artifacts and improve tracer uptake measurements. With the great impact that these methods have on the diagnostic and quantitative quality of PET images, much research has been performed in this area and this paper outlines the various approaches that have been developed as applied to whole-body PET imaging.