High-quality 3-D coronary artery imaging on an interventional C-arm x-ray system.

ABSTRACT

PURPOSE: Three-dimensional (3-D) reconstruction of the coronary arteries during a cardiac catheter-based intervention can be performed from a C-arm based rotational x-ray angiography sequence. It can support the diagnosis of coronary artery disease, treatment planning, and intervention guidance. 3-D reconstruction also enables quantitative vessel analysis, including vessel dynamics from a time-series of reconstructions. METHODS: The strong angular undersampling and motion effects present in gated cardiac reconstruction necessitate the development of special reconstruction methods. This contribution presents a fully automatic method for creating high-quality coronary artery reconstructions. It employs a sparseness-prior based iterative reconstruction technique in combination with projection-based motion compensation. RESULTS: The method is tested on a dynamic software phantom, assessing reconstruction accuracy with respect to vessel radii and attenuation coefficients. Reconstructions from clinical cases are presented, displaying high contrast, sharpness, and level of detail. CONCLUSIONS: The presented method enables high-quality 3-D coronary artery imaging on an interventional C-arm system.