Respiratory motion modeling in small animal PET using GATE

Respiratory motion is one source of degradation in PET images. Respiration leads to reduced contrast and quantitative accuracy in terms of recovered activity concentration and functional volumes, as a result of the associated image blurring. Consequently, the motion of lungs hindering the localization, detection, and the quantification of tracer uptake in lung lesions. Our long term goal is to study the impact of respiratory motion and evaluate the degradation on lesion detection in PET images. For that purpose, we used Monte Carlo simulations to produce realistic simulated data for the FDG radiotracer using the dynamic respiratory feature available in the 4D Mouse Whole-Body (MOBY) phantom including a lung lesion model.