Estimation of 6-Degree-of-Freedom (6-DOF) Rigid-Body Patient Motion From Projection Data by the Principal-Axes Method in Iterative Reconstruction

We developed a unique method for estimating and compensating rigid-body translations and rotations from scatter-and-attenuation-compensated projection data in iterative reconstruction when multiple projection angles are acquired at the same time. During reconstruction, both the non-attenuated and attenuated line-integrals are calculated. Their ratios are then multiplied to the scatter-corrected projection data to estimate scatter-and-attenuation-compensated projection data. At the end of each iteration, the sets of compensated projection data for the angles acquired at the same time are employed to calculate the center-of-mass and the inertia tensor, which are used to estimate the location and orientation of the imaging object by the principle-axes method. The estimated motion is applied in the next iteration to reposition the estimated slices and attenuation map in the projector and back-projector to match the pose of the patient at time the projections were acquired. To evaluate our method, we simulated an acquisition of the MCAT phantom with a 3-head SPECT system and imaged the Data Spectrum anthropomorphic phantom on a 3-head IRIX SPECT system. In simulations the phantom translated and rotated by the same amount 9 times. A numerical projector modeling the motion, attenuation, and distance-dependent blurring was used to generate the projection data. Poisson noise was added and 30 noise-realizations were generated. In the experiment with the anthropomorphic phantom, four 360-degree acquisitions were performed with the phantom translated or rotated beforehand. A motion-present dataset was made by mixing the 4 acquisitions. For both the MCAT phantom simulations and anthropomorphic phantom experiment, the motion-present data were reconstructed with 10 iterations of the OSEM which estimates and corrects the motion as described above. Our method obtained visually artifact-free reconstructions, while the reconstruction with no motion correction showed severe artifacts. The motion estimated from our method was in good agreement with the motion simulated. We determined in MCAT simulated and actual phantom acquisitions that our data-driven approach was effective reducing motion artifacts.