Reconstruction method for images of the beating heart
AssigneeWisconsin Alumni Research Foundation
InventorsCharles Mistretta, Julia Velikina, Oliver Wieben
Life of this patent
Estimating the term…
Abstract
Projection views of the moving heart and stationary background tissues are acquired and processed to provide corresponding moving tissue projection views. An average image is reconstructed in a conventional manner and a moving tissue image is reconstructed using a highly constrained backprojection method and a composite image formed from selected moving tissue projection views. The average image is then combined with the moving tissue image. The method is disclosed in a cardiac gated MRI scan.
Claims19
A method for producing an image of a moving subject positioned in a field of view (FOV) of a medical imaging system, the steps comprising:
- a) acquiring with the medical imaging system a set of projection views of the subject for each of a series of image frames;
- b) producing from the projection views acquired in step a) corresponding moving tissue projection views in which substantially only moving tissues are depicted;
- c) producing from more than one set of the projection views acquired in step a) an average image;
- d) reconstructing a composite image for one of said image frames using moving tissue projection views corresponding to the projection views acquired for said image frame plus other selected moving tissue projection views;
- e) reconstructing a moving tissue image for said image frame by:
- e)i) back projecting the moving tissue projection views corresponding to the projection views acquired for said image frame and weighting the value backprojected into each image pixel by the value of the corresponding pixel in the composite image;
- and
- e)ii) summing the backprojected values for each image pixel;
- and
- f) combining the moving tissue image and the average image.
Dependencies are inferred from the claim text.