Respiratory Motion Compensation Using Diaphragm Tracking for Cone-Beam C-Arm CT: A Simulation and a Phantom Study

Long acquisition times lead to image artifacts in thoracic C-arm CT. Motion blur caused by respiratory motion leads to decreased image quality in many clinical applications. We introduce an image-based method to estimate and compensate respiratory motion in C-arm CT based on diaphragm motion. In order to estimate respiratory motion, we track the contour of the diaphragm in the projection image sequence. Using a motion corrected triangulation approach on the diaphragm vertex, we are able to estimate a motion signal. The estimated motion signal is used to compensate for respiratory motion in the target region, for example, heart or lungs. First, we evaluated our approach in a simulation study using XCAT. As ground truth data was available, a quantitative evaluation was performed. We observed an improvement of about 14% using the structural similarity index. In a real phantom study, using the artiCHEST phantom, we investigated the visibility of bronchial tubes in a porcine lung. Compared to an uncompensated scan, the visibility of bronchial structures is improved drastically. Preliminary results indicate that this kind of motion compensation can deliver a first step in reconstruction image quality improvement. Compared to ground truth data, image quality is still considerably reduced.