SUMMARY OF INVENTION
Positron emission tomography (PET) images are typically acquired over time spans of minutes and can be degraded by a patient’s natural respiratory motion. In the case of cancer detection, this motion can impose limitations on lesion detectability, lesion volume, and standardized uptake value (SUV) quantification.
Respiratory gating is a strategy for overcoming this image degradation, but traditional methods for sorting data, (i.e. phase-based gating or amplitude-based gating) come with an inherent trade-offs between resolution improvements and added noise present in the subjugated data.
MSK’s investigator has developed a suite of “smart” 4D data utilization strategies to optimize and improve the resolution of these gated medical images, all of which can be merged into existing products:
- Frequency optimized gating – creates 4D images through a statistically-supported, frequency-based “gating+” algorithm, which maintains motion/resolution information while preserving ideal noise characteristics by locally adapting signal to its optimal segregation
- Data-driven amplitude based gating – uses data-driven amplitude signal for gating strategies to generate easily understandable motion-corrected images; allows for correction on images that will benefit, and avoidance of correction when unnecessary
- Integrating motion information in clinical settings – creates motion information images that collapse gated information into a simple readable format that can be fused with non-gated PET images without the risk of degradation
ADVANTAGES
- Allows for fully-automated, optimized use of gated data to reliably capture accurate motion information
- Simple implementation to existing gating systems: both software- and hardware-based
MARKET OPPORTUNITIES
The global nuclear imaging equipment market is projected to be worth more than $2 billion by 2020. These optimization strategies can be integrated with existing products, or can form the foundation of newly-developed software-driven products. This offers multiple opportunities for market penetration.
PUBLICATIONS
- Kesner et al. (2016) Frequency based gating: An alternative, conformal, approach to 4D PET data utilization. Medical Physics (PubMed link)
- Kesner et al. (2017) Data-driven optimal binning for respiratory motion management in PET. Medical Physics (PubMed link)
STAGE OF DEVELOPMENT
Prototype
PATENT INFORMATION
US National Patent issued.
LEAD INVESTIGATOR
Adam Kesner, PhD, Assistant Attending, Nuclear Imaging Physics, Memorial Hospital Research Laboratories
CONTACT INFORMATION
Rick Peng, MBA
Innovation Hub Manager
E-mail: [email protected]