Cardiac C-arm CT: 4D non-model based heart motion estimation and its application

摘要

The combination of real-time fluoroscopy and 3D cardiac imaging on the same C-arm system is a promising technique that might improve therapy planning, guiding, and monitoring in the interventional suite. In principal, to reconstruct a 3D image of the beating heart at a particular cardiac phase, a complete set of X-ray projection data representing that phase is required. One approximate approach is the retrospectively ECG-gated FDK reconstruction (RG-FDK). From the acquired data set of N_s multiple C-arm sweeps, those projection images which are acquired closest in time to the desired cardiac phase are retrospectively selected. However, this approach uses only 1/ N_s of the obtained data. Our goal is to utilize data from other cardiac phases as well. In order to minimize blurring and motion artifacts, cardiac motion has to be compensated for, which can be achieved using a temporally dependent spatial 3D warping of the filtered-backprojections. In this work we investigate the computation of the 4D heart motion based on prior reconstructions of several cardiac phases using RG-FDK. A 4D motion estimation framework is presented using standard fast non-rigid registration. A smooth 4D motion vector field (MVF) represents the relative deformation compared to a reference cardiac phase. A 4D deformation regridding by adaptive supersampling allows selecting any reference phase independently of the set of phases used in the RG-FDK for a motion corrected reconstruction. Initial promising results from in vivo experiments are shown. The subjects individual 4D cardiac MVF could be computed from only three RG-FDK image volumes. In addition, all acquired projection data were motion corrected and subsequently used for image reconstruction to improve the signal-to-noise ratio compared to RG-FDK.