Motion compensated reconstruction of the aortic valve for computed tomography

First published in
Progress in Biomedical Optics and Imaging - Proceedings of SPIE  
Number in series
10573
Article Number
1057331
Citation
Progress in Biomedical Optics and Imaging - Proceedings of SPIE (10573): 1057331 (2018)
Contribution to Conference
Medical Imaging 2018: Physics of Medical Imaging  
Publisher DOI
10.1117/12.2292877
Scopus ID
2-s2.0-85049249211
Motion compensated cardiac reconstruction in computed tomography (CT) has traditionally been focused on coronary arteries. However, with the increasing number of cardiac CT scans being performed for the diagnosis and treatment planning of valvular diseases, there is a clear need for motion correction of the aortic valve region to assist with the reproducibility of aortic annulus measurements. A second pass approach for aortic valve motion compensation on retrospective ECG-gated CT scans is introduced here. The processing chain is comprised of four steps. A gated multi-phase cardiac reconstruction is first performed, followed by a gradient based filter to enhance the edges in the resulting time series of volume images. Subsequently these normalized filtered results are made to undergo an elastic registration and finally followed by a motion compensated reconstruction that includes the estimated motion vector fields. The method was applied to twelve clinical cases and tested for systolic (30% R-R interval) and diastolic (70% R-R interval) imaging of the aortic valve. This second pass approach leads to a significant reduction of motion artifacts especially in late systole.