Feasibility of using respiration-averaged MR images for attenuation correction of cardiac PET/MR imaging.

Cardiac imaging is a promising application for combined PET/MR imaging. However, current MR imaging protocols for whole-body attenuation correction can produce spatial mismatch between PET and MR-derived attenuation data owing to a disparity between the two modalities' imaging speeds. We assessed the feasibility of using a respiration-averaged MR (AMR) method for attenuation correction of cardiac PET data in PET/MR images. First, to demonstrate the feasibility of motion imaging with MR, we used a 3T MR system and a two-dimensional fast spoiled gradient-recalled echo (SPGR) sequence to obtain AMR images ofa moving phantom. Then, we used the same sequence to obtain AMR images of a patient's thorax under free-breathing conditions. MR images were converted into PET attenuation maps using a three-class tissue segmentation method with two sets of predetermined CT numbers, one calculated from the patient-specific (PS) CT images and the other from a reference group (RG) containing 54 patient CT datasets. The MR-derived attenuation images were then used for attenuation correction of the cardiac PET data, which were compared to the PET data corrected with average CT (ACT) images. In the myocardium, the voxel-by-voxel differences and the differences in mean slice activity between the AMR-corrected PET data and the ACT-corrected PET data were found to be small (less than 7%). The use of AMR-derived attenuation images in place of ACT images for attenuation correction did not affect the summed stress score. These results demonstrate the feasibility of using the proposed SPGR-based MR imaging protocol to obtain patient AMR images and using those images for cardiac PET attenuation correction. Additional studies with more clinical data are warranted to further evaluate the method.