Iterative cardiac cone-beam CT reconstruction

High resolution images of coronary arteries are reconstructed with the algebraic reconstruction technique (ART) applied to cone-beam CT cardiac imaging. Due to the motion of the heart during the scan, only data belonging to the same phase of the heart cycle can be used in the reconstruction process. Currently, all known analytical image reconstruction algorithms for this problem are approximate and do not take the cone-an.-le fully into account. ART models the scanner geometry exactly and does not suffer from large-cone angles, which is especially important with the current trend in CT to use detectors with more and more rows and larger cone-angles. In this study; the influence of the cardiac weighting function on image quality is investigated. Cardiac ART (CART) is used to reconstruct images from clinical data obtained with current 16-row CT scanners. The results are compared to an analytical reconstruction method.