Adaptive processing to correct for organ motion artifacts in X-ray CT medical imaging systems

X-ray CT scanners provide images of transverse cross sections of the human body from a large number of projections. During the data acquisition process, which usually takes about one second, motion such as respiration, cardiac motion and patient restlessness produce artifacts that appear as blurring in the reconstructed images and may lead to inaccurate diagnosis. This paper proposes a motion correction method that makes no assumptions about the properties of the motion. The approach uses a spatial overlap correlator (SOC) scheme to track organ motion in computed tomography (CT) imaging systems. An adaptive interference cancellation (AIC) algorithm is then used to correct for organ-motion artifacts. Synthetic data tests demonstrate the validity of this approach