Elastic motion correction for cardiac PET studies

Motion in PET studies degrades image quality and introduces bias, which is critical for high resolution scanners such as mCT, mMR, and HRRT. In this work we describe and compare motion corrected cardiac studies of cardiac gating and dual (cardiac and respiratory) gating. Elastic motion information is extracted using Mass Preservation Optical Flow (MPOF), and motion correction is performed during the reconstruction process. Elastic motion corrected PET cardiac studies show less noise than individual gated images, and higher resolution than images without motion correction. Studies utilizing three different tracers (FDG, Ammonia, and Rubidium) are shown in the results.