Evaluation of a novel elastic respiratory motion correction algorithm on quantification and image quality in abdomino-thoracic PET/CT.

Our aim is to evaluate in phantom and patient studies a recently developed elastic motion debluring (EMDB) technique which makes use of all the acquired PET data and compare its performance to other conventional techniques such as phase based gating (PBG) and HDChest (HDC) both of which use fractions of the acquired data. Comparisons were made with respect to static whole-body (SWB) images with no motion correction. A phantom simulating respiratory motion of the thorax with lung lesions (5 spheres with ID=10- 28 mm) was scanned with 0, 1, 2, and 3 cm motion.