Evaluation of synergistic image registration for motion-corrected coronary NaF-PET-MR

Coronary artery disease (CAD) is caused by the formation of plaques in the coronary arteries and is one of the most common cardiovascular diseases. NaF-PET can be used to assess plaque composition, which could be important for therapy planning. One of the main challenges of NaF-PET is cardiac and respiratory motion which can strongly impair diagnostic accuracy. In this study, we investigated the use of a synergistic image registration approach which combined motion-resolved MR and PET data to estimate cardiac and respiratory motion. This motion estimation could then be used to improve the NaF-PET image quality. The approach was evaluated with numerical simulations and in vivo scans of patients suffering from CAD. In numerical simulations, it was shown, that combining MR and PET information can improve the accuracy of motion estimation by more than 15%. For the in vivo scans, the synergistic image registration led to an improvement in uptake visualization. This is the first study to assess the benefit of combining MR and NaF-PET for cardiac and respiratory motion estimation. Further patient evaluation is required to fully evaluate the potential of this approach. This article is part of the theme issue 'Synergistic tomographic image reconstruction: Part 1'.