Dynamic pacemaker artifact removal (DyPAR) from CT data using CNNs

First published in
Proceedings of machine learning research  
Number in series
102
Start Page
347
End Page
357
Citation
Proceedings of Machine Learning Research 102: 347-357 (2019)
Contribution to Conference
2nd International Conference on Medical Imaging with Deep Learning, MIDL 2019  
Publisher Link
https://proceedings.mlr.press/v102/
Scopus ID
2-s2.0-85079853502
Publisher
Microtome Publishing
Metal objects in the human heart like implanted pacemakers frequently occur in elderly patients. Due to cardiac motion, they are not static during the CT acquisition and lead to heavy artifacts in reconstructed CT image volumes. Furthermore, cardiac motion precludes the application of standard metal artifact reduction methods which assume that the object does not move. We propose a deep-learning-based approach for dynamic pacemaker artifact removal which deals with metal shadow segmentation directly in the projection domain. The data required for supervised learning is generated by introducing synthetic pacemaker leads into 14 clinical data sets without pacemakers. CNNs achieve a Dice coefficient of 0:913 on test data with synthetic metal leads. Application of the trained CNNs on eight data sets with real pacemakers and subsequent inpainting of the postprocessed segmentation masks leads to significantly reduced metal artifacts in the reconstructed CT image volumes.
Subjects
Cardiac CT
Convolutional Neural Networks
Metal Artifact Reduction
DDC Class
610: Medicine, Health
620: Engineering