T1- And T2-Weighted MR Acquisition for Bulk Motion Correction for Simultaneous PET-MR

Christoph Kolbitsch¹, Claudia Prieto¹, Charalampos Tsoumpas¹, Christian Buerger¹, Tobias Schaeffter¹

Simultaneous PET-MR acquisition has recently been proposed to improve cancer diagnosis by combining metabolic information from PET-acquisitions with high-resolution MR-images. Since PET data is usually acquired in multi-stations, 3D MR-images need to be obtained during the PET scan. Bulk motion during acquisition can severely impair image quality of both techniques. Here we present an MR acquisition which acquires T1- and T2-weighted 3D images and allows for the estimation of bulk motion from the data itself. The motion information can be used to correct MR and PET-images. Our approach was successfully tested in healthy volunteers in real MR-acquisitions and PET simulations.