Manual and semi-automatic registration vs retrospective ECG gating for correction of cardiac motion

Abstract

A manual and a semi-automatic image registration method were compared with retrospective ECG (rECG) gating to correct for cardiac motion in myocardial perfusion (MBF) measurement. 5 beagles were used in 11 experiments. For each experiment a 30 s cine CT scan of the heart was acquired after contrast injection. For the manual method, a reference end-diastole (ED) image was selected from the first cardiac cycle. ED images in subsequent cardiac cycles were manually selected to match the shape of the reference ED image. For each cardiac cycle in the semi-automatic method, the image with the maximum area and the most similar shape to the selected image of the previous cardiac cycle was chosen as ED image. MBFs were calculated from the images registered by the three methods and compared. The averages of the difference of MBF manual and MBF semi-auto and MBF rECG in the lateral free wall of LV were 3.6 and 3.4 ml/min/100g respectively. The corresponding standard deviations from the mean were 9.1 and 28.3 ml/min/100g respectively. We concluded from these preliminary results that image registration methods were better than rECG gating for correcting heart, which should facilitate more precise measurement of MBF.