Wierzbicki Marcin, Guiraudon Gérard M, Jones Douglas L, Peters Terry
Imaging Research Laboratories, Robarts Research Institute, 100 Perth Drive, P.O. Box 5015, N6A 5K8, London, Ontario, Canada.
Med Phys. 2007 Jun;34(6):1884-95. doi: 10.1118/1.2731030.
Two reasons for the recent rise in radiation exposure from CT are increases in its clinical applicability and the desire to maintain high SNR while acquiring smaller voxels. To address this emerging dose problem, several strategies for reducing patient exposure have already been proposed. One method employed in cardiac imaging is ECG-driven modulation of the tube current between 100% at one time point in the cardiac cycle and a reduced fraction at the remaining phases. In this paper, we describe how images obtained during such acquisition can be used to reconstruct 4D data of consistent high quality throughout the cardiac cycle. In our approach, we assume that the middiastole (MD) phase is imaged with full dose. The MD image is then independently registered to lower dose images (lower SNR) at other frames, resulting in a set of transformations. Finally, the transformations are used to warp the MD frame through the cardiac cycle to generate the full 4D image. In addition, the transformations may be interpolated to increase the temporal sampling or to generate images at arbitrary time points. Our approach was validated using various data obtained with simulated and scanner-implemented dose modulation. We determined that as little as 10% of the total dose was required to reproduce full quality images with a 1 mm spatial error and an error in intensity values on the order of the image noise. Thus, our technique offers considerable dose reductions compared to standard imaging protocols, with minimal effects on the quality of the final data.
CT辐射暴露近期增加的两个原因是其临床适用性的提高以及在获取更小体素时保持高信噪比的需求。为了解决这个新出现的剂量问题,已经提出了几种减少患者暴露的策略。心脏成像中采用的一种方法是在心动周期的一个时间点以100%的管电流进行心电图驱动调制,而在其余阶段将管电流降低一定比例。在本文中,我们描述了如何利用在这种采集过程中获得的图像来重建整个心动周期内质量一致的高质量4D数据。在我们的方法中,我们假设舒张中期(MD)阶段以全剂量成像。然后将MD图像独立配准到其他帧的低剂量图像(低信噪比)上,从而得到一组变换。最后,利用这些变换在整个心动周期中对MD帧进行变形,以生成完整的4D图像。此外,可以对变换进行插值以增加时间采样或在任意时间点生成图像。我们的方法通过使用模拟和扫描仪实现的剂量调制获得的各种数据进行了验证。我们确定,只需总剂量的10%就可以重现具有1毫米空间误差和强度值误差在图像噪声量级的全质量图像。因此,与标准成像协议相比,我们的技术可大幅降低剂量,对最终数据质量的影响最小。
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