Adaptive phase-coded reconstruction for cardiac CT

Cardiac imaging with conventional computed tomography (CT) has gained significant attention in recent years. New hardware development enables a CT scanner to rotate at a faster speed so that less cardiac motion is present in acquired projection data. Many new tomographic reconstruction techniques have also been developed to reduce the artifacts induced by the cardiac motion. Most of the algorithms make use of the projection data collected over several cardiac cycles to formulate a single projection data set. Because the data set is formed with samples collected roughly in the same phase of a cardiac cycle, the temporal resolution of the newly formed data set is significantly improved compared with projections collected continuously. In this paper, we present an adaptive phase-coded reconstruction scheme (APR) for cardiac CT. Unlike the previously proposed schemes where the projection sector size is identical, APR determines each sector size based on the tomographic reconstruction algorithm. The newly proposed scheme ensures that the temporal resolution of each sector is substantially equal. In addition, the scan speed is selected based on the measured EKG signal of the patient.