Low-dose cardio-respiratory phase-correlated cone-beam micro-CT of small animals

Purpose: Micro-CT imaging of animal hearts typically requires a double gating procedure because scans during a breath-hold are not possible due to the long scan times and the high respiratory rates. Simultaneous respiratory and cardiac gating can either be done prospectively or retrospectively. True five-dimensional information can be either retrieved with retrospective gating or with prospective gating if several prospective gates are acquired. In any case, the amount of information available to reconstruct one volume for a given respiratory and cardiac phase is orders of magnitude lower than the total amount of information acquired. For example, the reconstruction of a volume from a 10% wide respiratory and a 20% wide cardiac window uses only 2% of the data acquired. Achieving a similar image quality as a nongated scan would therefore require to increase the amount of data and thereby the dose to the animal by up to a factor of 50. Methods: To achieve the goal of low-dose phase-correlated (LDPC) imaging, the authors propose to use a highly efficient combination of slightly modified existing algorithms. In particular, the authors developed a variant of the McKinnon-Bates image reconstruction algorithm and combined it with bilateral filtering in up to five dimensions to significantly reduce image noise without impairing spatial or temporal resolution. Results: The preliminary results indicate that the proposed LDPC reconstruction method typically reduces image noise by a factor of up to 6 (e.g., from 170 to 30 HU), while the dose values lie in a range from 60 to 500 mGy. Compared to other publications that apply 250-1800 mGy for the same task [C. T. Badea et al., "4D micro-CT of the mouse heart," Mol. Imaging 4(2), 110-116 (2005); M. Drangova et al., "Fast retrospectively gated quantitative four-dimensional (4D) cardiac micro computed tomography imaging of free-breathing mice," Invest. Radiol. 42(2), 85-94 (2007); S. H. Bartling et al., "Retrospective motion gating in small animal CT of mice and rats," Invest. Radiol. 42(10), 704-714 (2007)], the authors' LDPC approach therefore achieves a more than tenfold dose usage improvement. Conclusions: The LDPC reconstruction method improves phase-correlated imaging from highly undersampled data. Artifacts caused by sparse angular sampling are removed and the image noise is decreased, while spatial and temporal resolution are preserved. Thus, the administered dose per animal can be decreased allowing for long term studies with reduced metabolic inference. (C) 2011 American Association of Physicists in Medicine. [DOI: 10.1118/1.3551993]