3D Coronary Artery Reconstruction by 2D Motion Compensation Based on Mutual Information

•We propose a new 2D motion compensated reconstruction method of coronary arteries.•The proposed method achieves a better 3D quality than other two reference methods.•The proposed method avoids the complex segmentation of the vessel centerlines.•The considerable improvement increases the clinical usability of 3D coronary artery. 3D reconstruction of the coronary arteries can provide more information in the interventional surgery. Motion compensation is one kind of the 3D reconstruction method. We propose a novel and complete 2D motion compensated reconstruction method. The main components include initial reconstruction, forward projection, registration and compensated reconstruction. We apply the mutual information (MI) and rigidity penalty (RP) as registration measure. The advanced adaptive stochastic gradient descent (ASGD) is adopted to optimize this cost function. We generate the maximum forward projection by the simplified distance driven (SDD) projector. The compensated reconstruction adopts the MAP iterative reconstruction algorithm which is based on L0 prior. Comparing with the ECG-gating reconstruction and other reference method, the evaluation indicates that the proposed 2D motion compensation leads to a better 3D reconstruction for both the rest and stronger motion phases. The algorithm compensates the residual motion and reduces the artifact largely. As the gating window width increases, the overall image noise decreases and the contrast of the vessels improves. The proposed method improved the 3D reconstruction quality and reduced the artifact level. The considerable improvement in the image quality results from motion compensation increases the clinical usability of 3D coronary artery.