A combined local and global motion estimation and compensation method for cardiac CT

Abstract

A new motion estimation and compensation method for cardiac computed tomography (CT) was developed. By combining two motion estimation (ME) approaches the proposed method estimates the local and global cardiac motion and then preforms motion compensated reconstruction. The combined motion estimation method has two parts: one is the local motion estimation, which estimates the coronary artery motion by using coronary artery tree tracking and registration; the other one is the global motion estimation, which estimates the entire cardiac motion estimation by image registration. The final cardiac motion is the linear combination of the coronary artery motion and entire cardiac motion the. We use the backproject-then-warp method proposed by Pack et al. to perform motion compensation reconstruction (MCR). The proposed method was evaluated with 5 patient data and improvements in sharpness of both coronary arteries and heart chamber boundaries were obtained.