Coronary segmentation based motion corrected cardiac CT reconstruction

Abstract

A method to obtain motion artifact-free reconstructed images of the coronary arteries is proposed and evaluated. The method relies on the integration of coronary motion estimation in an iterative computed tomography reconstruction technique. Coronary motion fields are derived from a set of coronary centerlines extracted at multiple cardiac phases within the R-R interval. Start and end points are provided by the user in one time-frame only. Corresponding centerline positions are used to determine the motion fields from phase to phase. Finally, dense motion fields are achieved by thin-plate-spline interpolation and are used to perform a motion-corrected iterative reconstruction of a selected region of interest, which results in an effective improvement of the reconstructed image quality.