Modelling the motion dependent point spread function in motion corrected small animal PET imaging

Motion corrected images from awake and freely moving animals often exhibit reduced resolution when compared to their stationary counterparts. This could be attributed to the combination of brief periods of fast animal motion and insufficient motion sampling speed. In this paper we hypothesise that we can measure the motion dependent point spread function of a given study and mitigate the motion blurring artifacts in the reconstructed images, in a similar way that a measured system response point spread function can improve resolution due to geometric effects (e.g. parallax errors). We investigated this hypothesis on a set of experimentally measured phantom data, which underwent a series of distinctively different motion patterns, ranging from slow to fast. Preliminary results showed that motion corrected images have reduced resolution compared to the stationary image and noticeable motion blurring artefacts, particularly for fast speed/acceleration settings. In addition, images deconvolved after reconstruction with the measured motion dependent PSF appear to be sharper compared to their unprocessed counterparts, yet without completely eliminating the motion blurring artefacts. Work is in progress to refine the methodology, by decomposing the geometric and motion components of the PSF, as well as including the deconvolution within the reconstruction algorithm.