Coronary artery disease (CAD) is caused by the formation of plaques in the coronary arteries and is one of the most common cardiovascular diseases. NaF-PET can be used to assess plaque composition, which could be important for therapy planning. One of the main challenges of NaF-PET is cardiac and respiratory motion which can strongly impair diagnostic accuracy. In this study, we investigated the use of a synergistic image registration approach which combined motion-resolved MR and PET data to estimate cardiac and respiratory motion. This motion estimation could then be used to improve the NaF-PET image quality. The approach was evaluated with numerical simulations and in vivo scans of patients suffering from CAD. In numerical simulations, it was shown, that combining MR and PET information can improve the accuracy of motion estimation by more than 15%. For the in vivo scans, the synergistic image registration led to an improvement in uptake visualization. This is the first study to assess the benefit of combining MR and NaF-PET for cardiac and respiratory motion estimation. Further patient evaluation is required to fully evaluate the potential of this approach.

This article is part of the theme issue ‘Synergistic tomographic image reconstruction: part 1’.

冠状动脉疾病（CAD）是由冠状动脉斑块的形成引起的，是最常见的心血管疾病之一。NaF-PET 可用于评估斑块组成，这对于治疗计划可能很重要。NaF-PET 的主要挑战之一是心脏和呼吸运动，这会严重影响诊断的准确性。在这项研究中，我们研究了协同图像配准方法的使用，该方法结合了运动分辨的 MR 和 PET 数据来估计心脏和呼吸运动。然后可以使用这种运动估计来提高 NaF-PET 图像质量。该方法通过数值模拟和体内评估对患有 CAD 的患者进行扫描。数值模拟表明，结合 MR 和 PET 信息可以将运动估计的准确性提高 15% 以上。对于体内扫描，协同图像配准导致摄取可视化的改善。这是第一项评估结合 MR 和 NaF-PET 对心脏和呼吸运动估计的益处的研究。需要进一步的患者评估以充分评估这种方法的潜力。

本文是主题问题“协同断层图像重建：第 1 部分”的一部分。