Motion blurring is still a challenge for cardiac CT imaging. A new motion estimation (ME) and motion compensation method is developed for cardiac CT. The proposed method estimates motion of entire heart, and then applies motion compensation. Therefore, the proposed method reduces motion artifacts not only in coronary artery region as most other methods did, but also reduces motion blurring in myocardium region. In motion compensated reconstruction, we use the Fourier transfer method proposed by Pack et al to obtain a series of partial images, and then warp and sum together to obtain final motion compensated images. The robustness and performance of the proposed method was verified with data from 10 patients and improvements in sharpness of both coronary arteries and myocardium were obtained.
Diagnosis of coronary artery disease with Coronary Computed Tomography Angiography (CCTA) is complicated by the presence of signi cant calci cation or stents. Volumetric CT Digital Subtraction Angiography (CTDSA) has recently been shown to be e ective at overcoming these limitations. Precise registration of structures is essential as any misalignment can produce artifacts potentially inhibiting clinical interpretation of the data. The fully-automated registration method described in this paper addresses the problem by combining a dense deformation eld with rigid-body transformations where calci cations/stents are present. The method contains non-rigid and rigid components. Non-rigid registration recovers the majority of motion artifacts and produces a dense deformation eld valid over the entire scan domain. Discrete domains are identi ed in which rigid registrations very accurately align each calci cation/stent. These rigid-body transformations are combined within the immediate area of the deformation eld using a distance transform to minimize distortion of the surrounding tissue. A recent interim analysis of a clinical feasibility study evaluated reader con dence and diagnostic accuracy in conventional CCTA and CTDSA registered using this method. Conventional invasive coronary angiography was used as the reference. The study included 27 patients scanned with a second-generation 320-row CT detector in which 41 lesions were identi ed. Compared to conventional CCTA, CTDSA improved reader con dence in 13/36 (36%) of segments with severe calci cation and 3/5 (60%) of segments with coronary stents. Also, the false positive rate of CTDSA was reduced compared to conventional CCTA from 18% (24/130) to 14% (19/130).
In the diagnosis of coronary artery disease with coronary computed tomography angiography, accurate evaluation remains challenging in the presence of calcifications or stents. Volumetric CT Digital Subtraction Angiography is a novel method that may become a powerful tool to overcome these limitations. However, precise registration of structures is essential, as even small misalignments can produce striking and disruptive bright and dark artefacts. Moreover, for clinical acceptance, the tool should require minimal user interaction and fast turnaround, thereby raising several challenges. In this paper we address the problem with a registration method based on a global non- rigid step, followed by local rigid refinement. In our quantitative analysis based on 10 datasets, each consisting of a pair of pre- and post-contrast scans of the same patient, we achieve an average Target Registration Error of 0.45 mm. Runtimes are less than 90 seconds for the global step, while each local refinement takes less than 15 seconds to run. Initial clinical evaluation shows good results in cases of moderate calcification, and indicates that around 50% of severely calcified and previously non-interpretable cases have been made interpretable by application of our method.
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