Image fusion or 4D cardiac CTA and MR images

Various imaging techniques can be used to evaluate coronary artery disease and cardiac function. However, no single imaging modality provides extensive information on both. The goal of this research is to develop a method for combining the coronary vasculature obtained from computed tomographic angiography (CTA) data with the myocardial functional information obtained from dynamic magnetic resonance (MR) data. Temporally matched cardiac CTA and trueFISP (true Fast Imaging with Steady-state Precession) MR images were obtained on human subjects. Each CTA volume was resampled according to the MR sampling scheme and spatially registered with the MR volume using an iterative closest point algorithm and the epicardial boundary points. The segmented coronary vasculature from CTA was surface rendered along with the original MR image planes. An expert in cardiac imaging visually verified the results of the 4D fusion. Future use of this technique will be investigated using additional data sets and types of functional MR images, i.e. perfusion and SPAMM (SPAtial Modulation of Magnetization)