Cardiac-motion correction for helical CT

The motion of the heart is a major challenge for cardiac imaging using computed tomography. An approach to decrease motion blur and to improve the signal-to-noise ratio is motion-corrected reconstruction which takes motion-vector fields into account in order to compensate motion. In this paper, the determination of a motion-vector field is described in a cardiac region-of-interest using elastic image registration while the reconstruction algorithm remains the same. The method can be applied to high contrast objects moving with the heart, such as vessels filled with contrast agent, calcified plaques or devices like stents.