Improving Gated Cardiac Scanning Using Limited-Angle Reconstruction Technique

Selected phases of the cardiac cycle can be imaged by the method of gated cardiac scanning using whole body scanners. However, since there is no synchronization between the random heart beats and the CT machine, the output will have gaps in the angular coverage of each scan. The missing projections in these gaps result in artifacts in the reconstructed images. In this paper the technique of limited-angle reconstruction is employed to fill in the missing projections to remove the artifacts. The object is transformed back and forth between the object space and the projection space, being corrected in each step by the constraints of the finite spatial extent and of the upper and lower bounds of the object in the object space, and the known projections in the projection space. It is found that by using the proposed algorithm the rms errors of the limited-angle images are reduced to a level comparable to those of the complete-angle images. The same iteration algorithm can also be used to reduce the fan beam scanning angle from 360 degree to 180 degree without sacrificing much image quality.