Motion compensated iterative reconstruction of a region of interest in cardiac cone-beam CT

A method for motion compensated iterative CT reconstruction of a cardiac region-of-interest is presented. The algorithm is an ordered subset maximum likelihood approach with spherically symmetric basis functions, and it uses an ECG for gating. Since the straightforward application of iterative methods to CT data has the drawback that a field-of-view has to be reconstructed, which covers the complete volume contributing to the absorption, region-of-interest reconstruction is applied here. Despite gating, residual object motion within the reconstructed gating window leads to motion blurring in the reconstructed image. To limit this effect, motion compensation is applied. Hereto, a gated 4D reconstruction at multiple phases is generated for the region-of-interest, and a limited set of vascular landmarks are manually annotated throughout the cardiac phases. A dense motion vector field is obtained from these landmarks by scattered data interpolation. The method is applied to two clinical data sets at strongest motion phases. Comparing the method to standard gated iterative reconstruction results shows that motion compensation strongly improved reconstruction quality. (C) 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.