Motion Artifacts in Oncological and Cardiac PET Imaging.

Image quality in PET examinations is influenced by several factors. Patient motion during PET data acquisition is a substantial problem that potentially leads to smearing artifacts, resulting in the loss of diagnostic accuracy both in visual and quantitative image analyses. In hybrid imaging, coregistration of functional (PET) and morphologic (CT or MR imaging) data can be hampered by patient movement between the acquisitions, resulting in additional sources of error. This article describes the artifacts due to patient movement.