Even with head restraint, small head movements can occur during data acquisition in emission tomography that are sufficiently large to result in detectable artifacts in the final reconstruction. Direct measurement of motion can be cumbersome and difficult to implement, whereas previous attempts to use the measured projection data for correction have been limited to simple translation orthogonal to the projection. A fully three-dimensional (3-D) algorithm is proposed that estimates the patient orientation based on the projection of motion-corrupted data, with incorporation of motion information within subsequent ordered-subset expectation-maximization subiterations. Preliminary studies have been performed using a digital version of the Hoffman brain phantom. Movement was simulated by constructing a mixed set of projections in discrete positions of the phantom. The algorithm determined the phantom orientation that best matched each constructed projection with its corresponding measured projection. In the case of a simulated single movement in 24 of 64 projections, all misaligned projections were correctly identified. Incorporating data at the determined object orientation resulted in a reduction of mean square difference (MSD) between motion-corrected and motion-free reconstructions, compared to the MSD between uncorrected and motion-free reconstructions, by a factor of 1.9
