Perfusion from angiogram and a priori (PAP) with temporal regularization

Perfusion imaging is often used for diagnosis and for assessment of the response to the treatment. If perfusion can be measured during interventional procedures, it could lead to quantitative, more efficient and accurate treatment; however, imaging modalities that allow continuous dynamic scanning are not available in most of procedure rooms. Thus, we developed a method to measure the perfusion―time attenuation curves (TACs)-of regions-of-interest (ROIs) using x-ray C-arm angiography system with no gantry rotation but with a priori. The previous study revealed a problem of large oscillations in the estimated TACs and the lack of comparison with CT-based approaches. Thus the purposes of this study were (1) to reduce the variance of TDCs; and (2) to compare the performance of the improved PAP with that of the CT-based perfusion method. Our computer simulation study showed that the standard deviation of PAP method was decreased by 10.7-59.0% and that it outperformed (20x or 200x times) higher dose CT methods in terms of the accuracy, variance, and the temporal resolution.