Estimation of kinetic parameters and tissue heterogeneity from patient motion corrupted PET projections

Patient motion lowers the resolution of modern PET scanners and hinders quantitative analysis. Accurate determination of the variation of regional kinetic parameter values can be viewed as a metric for tissue heterogeneity and gives new quantitative information. We have included a rigid motion model into an existing method for estimating the voxel-wise kinetic parameters from sinograms. In this method, the motion parameters are estimated simultaneously together with the other model parameters. No pre- or post processing of the data is needed. We have tested our method on numerical simulations with two noise levels. For low noise level, the motion and voxel-wise kinetic parameters were estimated successfully. For the relatively high noise level, the motion estimation was successful when regionally homogeneous tissue was assumed.