Compensation of Respiratory Motion Artifacts in Catheter-Based Intracoronary Images

Motion artifacts caused by cardiac/respiratory motion may reduce the visualization of in vivo free-breathing cardiac images and the effect of image-guided intervention. Cardiac motion artifacts can be effectively suppressed by ECG (electrocardiogram) gating. This work describes a method to compensate respiratory motion in free-breathing ECG-gated intracoronary image sequences acquired by pulling back the imaging catheter in the lumen. A rigid motion model of the vessel wall cross-sections is constructed based on generation and expression of the artifacts. Respiratory motion artifacts are suppressed through compensating the parameters of the model. The validity of the method has been demonstrated with in vivo intracoronary ultrasound (ICUS) and intracoronary optical coherence tomographic (IC-OCT) images. Results indicate that the visual quality of the longitudinal cuts is improved significantly and the saw-tooth shaped vessel wall borders caused by the artifacts are smoothed. The average inter-frame difference is significantly reduced in contrast to the original one. The integrity of the dataset is ensured in comparison with the respiratory gating scheme.