CAT's eye image: superimposed display of the coronary artery on bull's eye image of SPECT

Deals with a method of generating a CAT's Eye Image, in which the coronary arterial tree is superimposed on bull's eye map of SPECT. One can grasp the myocardial function more easily in connection with the shape of the coronary artery. The CAT's eye image is easily obtainable through some manual pointing on coronary angiograms (CAG) followed by an automatic matching method: First, a rough shape of the left ventricle (LV) is estimated by using SPECT data. This 3-D LV model is projected on a pair of bi-plane CAG images. By scanning the LV surface projected on CAG, one can obtain two temporal 2-D coronary images on a bull's eye map. By maximizing a matching degree between two temporal images, registration between CAG and SPECT is performed. Finally the CAT's eye image is obtained by integrating two temporal 2-D coronary images and bull's eye image of SPECT. The authors' method has been successfully applied to one artificial data set and several clinical cases.