Respiratory Motion is an emerging issue; clinicians have to care about respiratory movement in various applications not only in the near future but also today. There are various fields of applications within medicine where respiratory motion has to be accounted, e.g. 4-D CT, 4-D MRI, PET, SPECT, Radiotherapy. Nowadays, imaging devices are sufficient enough in spatial resolution to acquire high quality images, but the temporal resolution, especially in applications, where moving targets are observed causes still problems. Basically there are two sources causing motion within the body: - respiration - heartbeat The motion caused due to respiration is accounted within this project. This project investigates the ability of time-of-flight sensors to enable new ways of a non contact multidimensional measurement of respiratory motion. Using this new technology, no additional markers or hardware is required to be applied to the patient. It is possible to acquire an n-D respiratory signal of the patient. This signal can be used to reconstruct 4-D CT, 4-D MRI, PET, SPECT. Furthermore it can be used for gated radiotherapy applications.

Head: Hornegger, Joachim

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Team: Schaller, Christian
Dr. Florian Höpfl
Peter Nix

Start: 2007-06-01
End: 2010-06-01