3D imaging of the heart chambers with C-arm CT

Nowadays, angiography is the gold standard for the visualization of the morphology of the cardiac vasculature and cardiac chambers in the interventional suite. Up to now, high resolution 2-D X-ray images are acquired with a C-arm system in standard views and the diagnosis of the cardiologist is based on the observations in the planar X-ray images. No dynamic analysis of the cardiac chambers can be performed in 3-D. In the last years, cardiac imaging in 3-D using a C-arm system becomes of more and more interest in the interventional catheter laboratory. However, cardiac motion is a challenging problem in 3-D imaging, which leads to severe imaging artifacts in the 3-D image. Therefore, the main research goal of this thesis was the visualization and extraction of dynamic and functional parameters of the cardiac chambers in 3-D using an interventional angiographic C-arm system. In this thesis, two different approaches for cardiac chamber motion-compensated reconstruction have been developed and evaluated. The first technique addresses the visualization of the left ventricle. The second motion-compensated reconstruction approach uses volume-based motion estimation algorithms for the reconstruction of two left atrium and left ventricle - to four heart chambers. Overall, the results of this thesis highly demonstrate the feasibility of dynamic and functional cardiac chamber imaging using data from an interventional angiographic C-arm system for clinical applications.