Motion tracking and radionuclide imaging

PET and SPECT provide important functional and biochemical information about a patient's health. However, the typical nuclear medicine study requires lengthy acquisition times during which involuntary patient motion can lead to blurring in the radionuclide image. It is therefore important to be able to track and compensate for this motion, and to understand the relationship between internal organ motion/deformation and the motion of an externally observable structure such as the skin. Optical motion tracking (using a Polaris camera and passive markers) and MRI were used to characterize patient respiratory movement and generate models of respiratory-induced motion. These data were also used in SPECT imaging simulations to model the effects of realistic respiratory motion on nuclear medicine images. These studies should be useful for informing numerical, dynamic models of human anatomy and understanding the system specifications required for functional image-guided therapies.