Effect of Image Noise on Registration in PET Brain Imaging

Rigid image registration techniques can be used in PET imaging to align frames acquired during a brain scan where motion may or may not have been present during the scan. The subsequent estimated motion parameters can be used to correct for the motion. Shorter frames provide better temporal resolution but suffer from increased noise, which may degrade the quality of the image registration. The relationship between the image noise (by proxy of the frame count level) and the accuracy of the image registration is investigated. For FDG brain studies, a true coincidence level of 200 x 10(3) (usually approximately 1 sec frame duration) was found to provide adequate image quality for accurate registration.