Toward Time Resolved Cardiac CT Images with Patient Dose Reduction: Image-based Motion Estimation

Two major problems with the current electrocardiogram-gated cardiac CT imaging technique are a large patient radiation dose and insufficient temporal resolution. Our long-term goal is to develop new time resolved and low dose cardiac CT imaging techniques that consist of image reconstruction algorithms and estimation methods of the time-dependent motion vector field of the heart from the acquired CT data. Toward this goal, we developed a method that estimates the 2D components of the motion vector field from a sequence of cardiac CT images.