Respiratory motion correction with internal-external motion correlation, and associated systems and methods

1. A method of correcting motion blurring in positron emission tomography-computed tomography (“PET/CT”) imaging, the method comprising:

obtaining PET/CT imaging data of a target tissue in a patient via an imaging system positioned proximate to the patient;

determining a centroid of the target tissue;

obtaining an external motion signal of the patient;

determining a mean displacement of the external motion signal;

correlating the centroid of the target tissue with the mean displacement;

selecting a reference frame from a plurality of PET reference frames, wherein the selected reference frame is based, at least in part, on one PET reference frame from the plurality of PET frames that best matches Radon consistency conditions and attenuation correction data; and

based on the correlation and the selected reference frame, reconstructing a PET/CT image corrected for motion of the target tissue.

2. The method of claim 1 , further comprising binning at least a portion of the PET/CT imaging data into a plurality of phase frames.

3. The method of claim 2 wherein reconstructing the PET/CT image comprises reconstructing each of the individual phase frames.

4. The method of claim 3 wherein reconstructing each of the individual phase frames comprises reconstructing the phase frames using an ordered subset expectation maximization algorithm or iterative image reconstruction algorithm.

5. The method of claim 3 wherein reconstructing each of the individual phase frames comprises registering each individual phase frame to a reference location using linear interpolation.

6. The method of claim 1 wherein correlating the centroid of the target tissue with the mean displacement comprises estimating a relationship between the centroid of the target tissue and the mean displacement using a fitted function.

7. The method of claim 1 wherein obtaining an external motion signal of the patient comprises positioning a marker on a chest or abdomen region of the patient and monitoring motion of the marker.

8. The method of claim 1 wherein reconstructing the PET/CT image corrected for motion of the target tissue comprises reconstructing the PET/CT image corrected for at least one of superior-inferior, left-right, or anterior-posterior motion of the target tissue.

9. The method of claim 1 wherein obtaining PET/CT imaging data of the target tissue comprises obtaining the PET/CT imaging data of a target tissue in the patient's chest, abdomen, lower abdomen, thorax, pancreas, kidney, or cardiac system.

10. The method of claim 1 wherein reconstructing the PET/CT image corrected for motion of the target tissue comprises removing respiratory motion of the target tissue without increasing a quantity of noise in the PET/CT image.

11. The method of claim 1 , further comprising correcting the PET/CT image for attenuation, scatter, random coincidences, dead time, and detector efficiency.

12. A motion correction system for imaging a target tissue of a patient using positron emission tomography-computed tomography (“PET/CT”), the system comprising:

a PET/CT imaging system configured to be positioned proximate to the patient and record location data corresponding to a centroid of the target tissue;

an external motion marker configured to generate an external motion signal; and

a physical computer-readable storage medium having stored thereon, computer-executable instructions that, if executed by a computing system, cause the computing system to perform operations comprising:

receiving the location data and the external motion signal;

correlating a mean displacement of the external motion signal with the location data;

converting the external motion signal to tissue location data;

selecting a reference frame from a plurality of PET reference frames ,wherein the selected reference frame is based, at least in part, on one PET reference frame from the plurality of PET frames that best matches Radon consistency conditions and attenuation correction data; and

based on the correlation and the selected reference frame, reconstructing a PET/CT image corrected for motion of the target tissue.

13. A system of claim 12 wherein the external motion marker comprises one or more of a reflective block, a stretching belt, a still or video camera, or a temperature sensor.

14. The system of claim 12 wherein the computer-executable instructions further cause the computing system to perform operations comprising:

binning at least a portion of the location data into a plurality of phase frames;

reconstructing each of the individual phase frames; and

registering each of the individual phase frames to a reference location and summing the phase frames to generate a final PET/CT image.