Motion compensation in functional imaging

A diagnostic imaging apparatus comprising:

• a respiratory monitor which monitors respiratory activity of a subject during an imaging scan;
• a cardiac monitor which bins raw image data acquired during the scan in accordance with its occurrence in both respiratory and cardiac phases and monitors cardiac activity of the subject during the scan;
• a first modality scanner that reconstructs the binned raw data to generate a plurality of volumetric heart images in each of a plurality of respiratory and cardiac phases, wherein each of the plurality of volumetric heart images are three-dimensional;
• a respiratory adjustment processor that, for each of the plurality of cardiac phases, transforms volumetric images of the plurality of volumetric images which share the cardiac phase and have different respiratory phases into a series of respiratory compensated volumetric images at a selected common respiratory phase, the selected common respiratory phase common to the plurality of cardiac phases;
• a respiration summing routine that, for each of the plurality of cardiac phases, combines the volumetric images of each series of respiratory compensated volumetric images into a combined respiratory compensated volumetric image;
• a cardiac transforming routine that transforms the combined respiratory compensated volumetric images of the plurality of cardiac phases in accordance with a heart shape and motion model to generate a series of cardiac and respiratory compensated volumetric images in a selected common cardiac phase and the selected common respiratory phase, wherein the heart shape and motion model models a three-dimensional volume of a heart;
• and,
• a cardiac summing routine that combines the images of the series of cardiac and respiratory compensated volumetric images.

A diagnostic imaging apparatus comprising:

• a respiratory monitor that monitors respiratory activity of a subject during imaging scans with a first imaging modality and a second imaging modality;
• a cardiac monitor which monitors cardiac phases of the subject during the imaging scans;
• at least one processor programmed to:
• receive the monitored respiratory and a plurality of cardiac phases and raw data acquired by the first imaging modality and the second imaging modality during the imaging scans and bins the raw image data in accordance with the respiratory and cardiac phases;
• reconstructs the binned raw data into a plurality of heart images of the subject corresponding to the plurality of cardiac phases;
• fit a generic heart shape and motion model to the plurality of heart images of the first imaging modality to generate a heart shape and motion model, the heart shape and motion model specific to the subject, wherein the heart shape and motion model models the entire shape of a heart;
• generate a plurality of cardiac compensated images in a selected common cardiac phase using the heart shape and motion model and the plurality of heart images of the second imaging modality;
• and,
• combining the plurality of cardiac compensated images.

A method of compensating for respiratory and cardiac movement in diagnostic imagine reconstruction comprising:

• monitoring respiratory activity of a subject during a nuclear imaging scan and creating a respiratory movement vector;
• monitoring cardiac activity of the subject during the scan;
• binning raw image data acquired during the scan in accordance with its occurrence in both respiratory and cardiac phases;
• reconstructing the binned raw data into a plurality of images;
• transforming the images in accordance with the respiratory movement vector;
• adjusting the resultant transformed images in accordance with a heart shape and motion model;
• and,
• combining the adjusted images.