Motion compensation for non-gated helical CT: application to lung imaging

Computed tomography (CT) imaging of the thorax is a common application of CT in radiology. Most of these scans are performed with a helical scan protocol. A significant number of images suffer from motion artefacts due to the inability of the patients to hold their breath or due to hiccups or coughing. Some images become nondiagnostic while others are simply degraded in quality. In order to correct for these artefacts a motion compensated reconstruction for non-periodic motion is required. For helical CT scans with a pitch smaller or equal to one the redundancy in the helical projection data can be used to generate images at the identical spatial position for multiple time points. As the scanner moves across the thorax during the scan, these images do not have a fixed time point, but a well-defined temporal distance inbetween the images. Using image based registration a motion vector field can be estimated based on these images. The motion artefacts are corrected in a subsequent motion compensated reconstruction. The method is tested on mathematical phantom data (reconstruction) and clinical lung scans (motion estimation and reconstruction).