Time-of-flight sensor for respiratory motion gating.

In this technical note we present a system that uses time-of-flight (ToF) technology to acquire a real-time multidimensional respiratory signal from a 3D surface reconstruction of the patient's chest and abdomen without the use of markers. Using ToF sensors it is feasible to acquire a 3D model in real time with a single sensor. An advantage of ToF sensors is that their high lateral resolution makes it possible to define multiple regions of interest to compute an anatomy-adaptive multidimensional respiratory signal. We evaluated the new approach by comparing a ToF based respiratory signal with the signal acquired by a commercially available external respiratory gating system and achieved an average correlation coefficient of 0.88.