Low-dose CT Cardiac Imaging

Cardiac imaging with computed tomography （CT） is one of the most recent advancements in CT clinical applications.Because of the low helical pitch employed in the cardiac acquisition protocols,radiation dose to patient is high.In this paper,we present a different data acquisition and image reconstruction technique that reduces dose to patient by 50%～89%.The key enabler for such technique is the large volume coverage （40 mm） of the 64-slice scanner.Compared to an average heart size of 120 mm to 140 mm the new VCT scanner is capable of covering the entire organ in 3 to 4 steps. In conjunction with the new acquisition,we present a complimentary reconstruction algorithm that overcomes incomplete projection samples.We conducted extensive phantom and clinical experiments to demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed approach.