Comparison of two elastic motion correction approaches for whole-body PET/CT: motion deblurring vs gate-to-gate motion correction

BACKGROUND: Respiratory motion in PET/CT leads to well-known image degrading effects commonly compensated using elastic motion correction approaches. Gate-to-gate motion correction techniques are promising tools for improving clinical PET data but suffer from relatively long reconstruction times. In this study, the performance of a fast elastic motion compensation approach based on motion deblurring (DEB-MC) was evaluated on patient and phantom data and compared to an EM-based fully 3D gate-to-gate motion correction method (G2G-MC) which was considered the gold standard. METHODS: Twenty-eight patients were included in this study with suspected or confirmed malignancies in the thorax or abdomen. All patients underwent whole-body [(18)F]FDG PET/CT examinations applying hardware-based respiratory gating. In addition, a dynamic anthropomorphic thorax phantom was studied with PET/CT simulating tumour motion under controlled but realistic conditions. PET signal recovery values were calculated from phantom scans by comparing lesion activities after motion correction to static ground truth data. Differences in standardized uptake values (SUV) and metabolic volume (MV) between both reconstruction methods as well as between motion-corrected (MC) and non motion-corrected (NOMC) results were statistically analyzed using a Wilcoxon signed-rank test. RESULTS: Phantom data analysis showed high lesion recovery values of 91% (2 cm motion) and 98% (1 cm) for G2G-MC and 83% (2 cm) and 90% (1 cm) for DEB-MC. The statistical analysis of patient data found significant differences between NOMC and MC reconstructions for SUV (max), SUV (mean), MV, and contrast-to-noise ratio (CNR) for both reconstruction algorithms. Furthermore, both methods showed similar increases of 11–12% in SUV (max) and SUV (mean) after MC. The statistical analysis of the MC/NOMC ratio found no significant differences between the methods. CONCLUSION: Both motion correction techniques deliver comparable improvements of SUV (max), SUV (mean), and CNR after MC on clinical and phantom data. The fast elastic motion compensation technique DEB-MC may thereby be a valuable alternative to state-of-the art motion correction techniques.