Motion-compensated reconstruction of tomographic image sequences

In this paper we study a motion-compensated approach for simultaneous reconstruction of image frames in a time sequence. We treat the frames in a sequence collectively as a single function of both space and time, and define a temporal prior to account for the temporal correlations in a sequence. This temporal prior is defined in a form of motion-compensation, aimed to follow the curved trajectories of the object motion through space-time. The image frames are then obtained through estimation using the expectation-maximization (EM) algorithm. The proposed algorithm was evaluated extensively using the 4D gated mathematical cardiac-torso (gMCAT) D1.01 phantom to simulate gated SPECT perfusion imaging with Tc99m. Our experimental results demonstrate that the use of motion compensation for reconstruction can lead to significant improvement in image quality and reconstruction accuracy.