Fully automatic motion correction on dynamic renal scintigraphy

Ziel/Aim:

Dynamic renal studies are an important part of nuclear medicine imaging. Making an accurate medical diagnosis requires the patient to remain motionless for the duration of the study, which is not always achievable, especially in case of children, due to the long imaging process. Correcting these displacements manually frame by frame can be a tedious task. Our goal is to find an automatic and fast motion correction algorithm that minimizes the motion of kidneys between 2D image frames with various intensity scales between frames and studies.

Methodik/Methods:

We propose a rigid body registration algorithm which registers the time frames pairwise, choosing one as fixed image and the following as moving image. We repeat this process until there are no more frames left. We initialize the starting frame by segmenting the kidneys on every time frame and choosing the image from which the kidney shapes start to stagnate. Taking advantage of the small intensity differences between two neighboring frames, we use the Mean Squares Error metric with gradient descent optimization method.

Ergebnisse/Results:

We tested our algorithm on 16 different dynamic renal studies (Tc-99 m-DTPA) acquired on the AnyScan SPECT system. 3 studiescontained no serious motion, while 13 were moderately or seriously affected by displacements. Using the proposed motion correction method, the corrected maximum translations were 4.86 mm and 7.29 mm (x and y axis) in the first group; 31.59 mm and 55.89 mm in the second group. On motion corrected studies ROI definition on summation image was sufficient to contain the kidneys on each frame in every case (16/16) which was verified by two specialists in nuclear medicine.

Schlussfolgerungen/Conclusions:

We conclude that our fully automatic method is capable of correcting even large motions on dynamic renal images while not damaging the quality of those studies on which no significant motion is present.