Exploring Anatomical Similarity in Cardiac-Gated Spect Images for A Deep Learning Network

Motion compensation is effective for reducing motion blur in cardiac gated imaging. In this work, we investigate the potential benefit of incorporating an anatomical similarity measure in training a deep learning (DL) network for motion compensation on cardiac gated SPECT images, which are known to suffer from limited data counts and exhibit image intensity distortion (due to partial-volume effect) associated with cardiac motion. In this similarity measure we utilize the spatial image gradient to characterize the correspondence of boundary points on the left-ventricular wall between two gate frames. In the experiment we demonstrated this approach on a set of 197 clinical acquisitions, and the results show that with the proposed approach the DL network can improve the anatomical similarity among the gate frames upon motion compensation.