Partial scan artifact reduction (PSAR) for the assessment of cardiac perfusion in dynamic phase-correlated CT

Cardiac CT achieves its high temporal resolution by lowering the scan range from 2π to π plus fan.angle (partial scan). This, however, introduces CT-value variations depending on the start angle of the π range. These partial scan artifacts are in the order of a few HU and prevent the quantitative evaluation of perfusion measurements. Our PSAR algorithm corrects a dynamic phase-correlated scan without a priori information. In general a full scan does not suffer from partial scan artifacts since all projections in [0; 2π] contribute to the data. In order to maintain the optimum temporal resolution and the phase-correlation PSAR creates an artificial full scan pn^F by projection-wise averaging a set of neighboring partial scans pn^P from the same perfusion examination (typically N = 30 phase-correlated partial scans distributed over 20 s). Corresponding to the angular range of each partial scan we extract virtual partial scan data sets pn^V from the artificial full scan pn^F. A standard reconstruction yields the corresponding images fn^P, fn^F and fn^V. Subtracting the artificial full scan image fn^F from the virtual partial scan image fn^V yields an artifact image that can be used to correct the original partial scan image: fn^C = fn^P − (fn^V − fn^F). Our method has been validated with a simulated semi-anthropomorphic heart phantom and with clinical scans. For the simulated case real full scans have been performed to provide theoretical reference values. The improvement of the root mean square errors between the full scans and the partial, respectively corrected scans, is up to 54%. The phase-correlated data now appear accurate enough for a quantitativ- - e analysis of cardiac perfusion.