A blob-based tomographic reconstruction of 3D coronary trees from rotational x-ray angiography

ISBN : 9780819470973International audienceA method is proposed for a 3D reconstruction of coronary networks from rotational projections that departs from motion-compensated approaches. It deals with multiple views extracted from a time-stamped image sequence through ECG gating. This statistics-based vessel reconstruction method relies on a new imaging model by considering both the effect of background tissues and the image representation using spherically-symmetric basis functions, also called 'blobs'. These blobs have a closed analytical expression for the X-ray transform, which makes easier to compute a cone-beam projection than a voxel-based description. A Bayesian maximum a posteriori (MAP) estimation is used with a Poisson distributed projection data instead of the Gaussian approximation often used in tomography reconstruction. A heavy-tailed distribution is proposed as image prior to take into account the sparse nature of the object of interest. The optimization is performed by an expectation-maximization like (EM) block iterative algorithm which offers a fast convergence and a sound introduction of the non-negativity constraint for vessel attenuation coefficients. Simulations are performed using a model of coronary tree extracted from multidetector CT scanner and a performance study is conducted. They point out that, even with severe angular undersampling (6 projections over 110 degrees for instance) and without introducing a prior model of the object, significant results can be achieved