CT‐value conservation based spatial transformer network for cardiac motion correction

Abstract Artifact correction is a great challenge in cardiac imaging. During the correction of coronary tissue with motion‐induced artifacts, the spatial distribution of CT value not only shifts according to the motion vector field (MVF), but also shifts according to the volume change rate of the local voxels. However, the traditional interpolation method does not conserve the CT value during motion compensation. A new sample interpolation algorithm is developed based on the constraint of conservation of CT value before and after image deformation. This algorithm is modified on the existing interpolation algorithms and can be embedded into neural networks with deterministic back propagation. Comparative experimental results illustrate that the method can not only correct motion‐induced artifacts, but also ensure the conservation of CT value in the region of interest (ROI) area, so as to obtain corrected images with clinically recognized CT value. Both effectiveness and efficiency are proved in forward motion correction process and backward training steps in deep learning. Simultaneously, using the network to learn the MVF making this method more interpretable than the existing image‐based end‐to‐end deep learning method.