Investigation of Calcified Coronary Plaque Tracking in Cardiac CT

This paper illustrates two implementations of an algorithm for tracking the movements of small high contrast structures such as calcified coronary plaques over advancing temporal phases in cardiac CT. The algorithm is based on integrating concepts of image reconstruction and image segmentation. The essential difference between the two implementations of this algorithm is that the first uses the chord-based backprojection filtration (BPF) algorithm for image reconstruction, and the second uses a weighted filtered backprojection (WFBP) algorithm, which incorporates an explicit short-scan weighting function.