Prospectively gated cardiac CT

Future cardiac CT protocols will utilize large area detectors with whole heart scans performed within one heartbeat. For such scans, accurate prospective ECG gating is essential to capture the heart at the correct phase. This report addresses one of the main factors affecting the prospective gating accuracy: the ability to predict the cardiac phase from the ECG signal. Two different scanning methods with equal average dose utilization along with 6 different prediction algorithms are compared and evaluated on 245 patient ECG signals. In general, all the algorithms performed comparably while, perhaps surprisingly, the best scan method was to rescan the patient as necessary as opposed to elongating a single scan.