Detection of respiratory movement during SPECT/PET data acquisition

In the reconstruction of a myocardial SPECT or PET image, respiration causes serious blurring. The aim of this study is to compensate for this blurring by monitoring the movement of the thorax. The measurement should be done without touching the patient and with high accuracy. Our system uses a fiber-grating device (FGD) and an ITV camera for detecting the respiratory movement with images sequentially acquired during the data acquisition in SPECT or PET. When we project a laser beam onto the FGD, a dot-matrix pattern is created and these bright spots are projected onto an object. By monitoring a group of dot matrix patterns we can compensate for the position in which the gamma rays are being detected. In this paper we describe the preliminary results of a system for measuring respiratory movement with a fiber-grating vision sensor.