Respiratory motion compensation using diaphragm tracking for cone-beam C-Arm CT: a simulation and a phantom study

  • Authors:
  • Marco Bögel;Hannes G. Hofmann;Joachim Hornegger;Rebecca Fahrig;Stefan Britzen;Andreas Maier

  • Affiliations:
  • Pattern Recognition Lab, Friedrich-Alexander-University Erlangen-Nuremberg, Erlangen, Germany;Pattern Recognition Lab, Friedrich-Alexander-University Erlangen-Nuremberg, Erlangen, Germany;Pattern Recognition Lab, Friedrich-Alexander-University Erlangen-Nuremberg, Erlangen, Germany;Department of Radiology, Lucas MRS Center, Stanford University, Palo Alto, CA;Siemens AG, Forchheim, Germany;Siemens AG, Forchheim, Germany

  • Venue:
  • Journal of Biomedical Imaging
  • Year:
  • 2013

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Abstract

Long acquisition times lead to image artifacts in thoracic C-arm CT. Motion blur caused by respiratory motion leads to decreased image quality in many clinical applications.We introduce an image-based method to estimate and compensate respiratory motion in C-arm CT based on diaphragm motion. In order to estimate respiratory motion, we track the contour of the diaphragm in the projection image sequence. Using a motion corrected triangulation approach on the diaphragm vertex, we are able to estimate a motion signal. The estimated motion signal is used to compensate for respiratory motion in the target region, for example, heart or lungs. First, we evaluated our approach in a simulation study using XCAT. As ground truth data was available, a quantitative evaluation was performed.We observed an improvement of about 14% using the structural similarity index. In a real phantom study, using the artiCHEST phantom, we investigated the visibility of bronchial tubes in a porcine lung. Compared to an uncompensated scan, the visibility of bronchial structures is improved drastically. Preliminary results indicate that this kind ofmotion compensation can deliver a first step in reconstruction image quality improvement. Compared to ground truth data, image quality is still considerably reduced.