Validation of software gating: a practical technology for respiratory motion correction in PET

Purpose: To assess the performance of hardware-and softwaregating technologies in terms of qualitative and quantitative characteristics of respiratory motion in positron emission tomography (PET) imaging. Materials and Methods: Between 2010 and 2013, 219 fluorine 18 fluorodeoxyglucose PET examinations were performed in 116 patients for assessment of pulmonary nodules. All patients provided informed consent in this institutional review board-approved study. Acquisitions were reconstructed as respiratory-gated images by using hardware-derived respiratory triggers and software-derived signal (via an automated postprocessing method). Asymmetry was evaluated in the joint distribution of reader preference, and linear mixed models were used to evaluate differences in outcomes according to gating type. Results: In blind reviews of reconstructed gated images, software was selected as superior 16.9% of the time (111 of 657 image sets; 95% confidence interval [CI]: 14.0%, 19.8%), and hardware was selected as superior 6.2% of the time (41 of 657 image sets; 95% CI: 4.4%, 8.1%). Of the image sets, 76.9% (505 of 657; 95% CI: 73.6%, 80.1%) were judged as having indistinguishable motion quality. Quantitative analysis demonstrated that the two gating strategies exhibited similar performance, and the performance of both was significantly different from that of nongated images. The mean increase±standard deviation in lesion maximum standardized uptake value was 42.2%±38.9 between nongated and software-gated images, and lesion full width at half maximum values decreased by 9.9% 6 9.6. Conclusion: Compared with vendor-supplied respiratory-gating hardware methods, software gating performed favorably, both qualitatively and quantitatively. Fully automated gating is a feasible approach to motion correction of PET images.