A Respiratory Motion Estimation Method Based on MEMS Sensors for Gated Positron Emission Tomography

Abstract

This work presents a novel method for estimating respiratory motion using Microelectromechanical Systems (MEMS) sensors. As an application of the method the amplitude gating of Positron Emission Tomography (PET) imaging is considered, and the method is compared against a clinically used respiration motion estimation technique. The presented method can be used to detect respiratory cycles and estimate their lengths with state-of-the-art accuracy when compared to other MEMS-based methods, and is the first reported MEMS inertial measurement unit -based method, which can estimate the absolute respiratory position. When applied to gated PET imaging, the method performs quantitatively similarly to the clinically used technique. As a result, the new method can be used to estimate respiratory motion, and could be used to simplify the logistics related to respiratory motion estimation in PET imaging studies, and also to enable multi-position motion measurements for advanced organ motion estimation.