Non-periodic 3-D motion estimation and reconstruction of coronary stents

C-arm CT enables 3-D imaging at high spatial resolution. Image quality would be sufficient for coronary artery stents at rest. However, spatial resolution is severely degraded by cardiac motion which needs to be considered in the reconstruction step. Existing approaches are based on detecting markers in the projection images. Based on the exact marker locations in all images, motion estimation and compensation is performed in the 2-D projection image domain and thus no 3-D motion information of the stent is available. In this paper a novel method for computing the non-periodic location of the stent markers in 3-D is proposed. The motion estimation step comprises marker detection in 2-D, computation of periodic 3-D motion and computation of non-periodic 3-D motion. For motion compensation the 3- D marker positions are used to compute an affine motion model as input for a motion compensated FDK reconstruction algorithm. First clinical results suggest a high image quality and the possibility to compute physiological parameters e.g. velocity curves. (orig.)