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Automatic Cardiac Self-Gating of Small-Animal PET Data

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Abstract

Purpose

The cardiac gating signal (CGS) in positron emission tomography (PET) studies is usually obtained from an electrocardiography (ECG) monitor. In this work, we propose a method to obtain the CGS in small-animal PET using the acquired list-mode data without using any hardware or end-user input.

Procedures

The CGS was obtained from the number of coincidences over time acquired in the lines-of-response connected with the cardiac region. This region is identified in the image as its value changes with frequencies in the range of 3 to 12 Hz. The procedure was tested in a study with 29 Wistar rats and 6 mice injected with 2-deoxy-2-[18F]fluoro-d-glucose, which underwent a 45-min single-bed list-mode PET scan of the heart syncronized with an ECG. The estimated signals and the reconstructed images using eight-gated frames were compared with the ones obtained using the ECG signal from the monitor.

Results

The differences of the PET-based CGS with respect to the ECG relative to the duration of the heartbeats were 5.6 % in rats and 11.0 % in mice. The reconstructed gated images obtained from the proposed method do not differ qualitatively with respect to the ones obtained with the ECG. The quantitative analysis of both set of images were performed measuring the volume of the left ventricle (LV) of the rats in the end-of-systole and end-of-diastole phase. The differences found in these parameters between both methods were below 12.1 % in the ESV and 9.3 % in the EDV with a 95 % confidence interval, which are comparable to the accuracy (7 %) of the method used for segmenting the LV.

Conclusion

The proposed method is able to provide a valid and accurate CGS in small-animal PET list-mode data.

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Acknowledgments

This work was supported in part by Consejería de Educación, Juventud y Deporte de la Comunidad de Madrid (Spain) through the Madrid-MIT M+Visión Consortium, Comunidad de Madrid (S2013/MIT-3024 TOPUS-CM), UCM (Grupos UCM, 910059), CPAN (Consolider-Ingenio 2010, CSPD-2007-00042), RIC-RETIC network, Spanish MINECO (RD12/0042/0057), Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación, Spanish Government (ENTEPRASE grant, PSE-300000-2009-5 and TEC2007-64731/TCM), and European Regional funds.

Conflict of Interest

All authors declare that they have no competing interest.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Madrid-MIT M+Vision Consortium, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, USA

    Joaquin L. Herraiz

  2. Grupo de Física Nuclear, Universidad Complutense de Madrid, CEI Moncloa, Madrid, Spain

    Joaquin L. Herraiz & Jose M. Udias

  3. A.A.Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging, Massachusetts General Hospital, Charlestown, MA, USA

    Elena Herranz

  4. Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA, USA

    Elena Herranz

  5. Center for Medical Physics and Biomedical Engineering, Medical University of Vienna, Vienna, Austria

    Jacobo Cal-González

  6. Departamento de Ingenieria Biomedica e Ingeniería Aeroespacial, Universidad Carlos III de Madrid, Leganés, Spain

    Juan J. Vaquero, Manuel Desco & Lorena Cussó

  7. Instituto de Investigación Sanitaria Gregorio Marañón, Madrid, Spain

    Juan J. Vaquero, Manuel Desco & Lorena Cussó

  8. Centro de Investigación Biomédica en Red de Salud Mental (CIBERSAM), Madrid, Spain

    Manuel Desco & Lorena Cussó

Authors
  1. Joaquin L. Herraiz
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  2. Elena Herranz
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  3. Jacobo Cal-González
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  4. Juan J. Vaquero
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  5. Manuel Desco
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  6. Lorena Cussó
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  7. Jose M. Udias
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Joaquin L. Herraiz.

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Herraiz, J.L., Herranz, E., Cal-González, J. et al. Automatic Cardiac Self-Gating of Small-Animal PET Data. Mol Imaging Biol 18, 109–116 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11307-015-0868-y

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11307-015-0868-y

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