Automatic registration of cardiac PET/CT for attenuation correction

Misalignments of images in cardiac Positron Emission Tomography (PET)-CT imaging may lead to erroneous Attenuation Correction (AC) and mis-diagnosis. Such misalignment may be corrected manually prior to reconstruction and clinical assessment; however this step is laborious and may be subject to operator variability. The aim of this study is to assess the performance of an algorithm to automatically align CT to PET prior to AC. We conclude that automatic registration is a viable option for the task of aligning cardiac CT and PET for AC, with a consistency comparable to that of using manual alignment.