Motion estimation and compensation for coronary artery and myocardium in cardiac CT

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.