Automated motion correction based on target tracking for dynamic nuclear medicine studies

Nuclear medicine dynamic studies of kidneys, bladder and stomach are important diagnostic tools. Accurate generation of time-activity curves from regions of interest (ROIs) requires that the patient remains motionless for the duration of the study. This is not always possible since some dynamic studies may last from several minutes to one hour. Several motion correction solutions have been explored. Motion correction using external point sources is inconvenient and not accurate especially when motion results from breathing, organ motion or feeding rather than from body motion alone. Centroid-based motion correction assumes that activity distribution is only inside the single organ (without background) and uniform, but this approach is impractical in most clinical studies. In this paper, we present a novel technique of motion correction that first tracks the organ of interest in a dynamic series then aligns the organ. The implementation algorithm for target tracking-based motion correction consists of image preprocessing, target detection, target positioning, motion estimation and prediction, tracking (new search region generation) and target alignment. The targeted organ is tracked from the first frame to the last one in the dynamic series to generate a moving trajectory of the organ. Motion correction is implemented by aligning the organ ROIs in the image series to the location of the organ in the first image. The proposed method of motion correction has been applied to several dynamic nuclear medicine studies including radionuclide cystography, dynamic renal scintigraphy, diuretic renography and gastric emptying scintigraphy.