Free-breathing respiratory motion of the heart measured from x-ray coronary angiograms (Second Place Student Paper Award)

Respiratory motion compensation for cardiac imaging requires knowledge of the heart's motion and deformation during breathing. We propose a method for measuring the natural tidal respiratory motion of the heart using free breathing coronary angiograms. A 3D deformation field describing the cardiac and respiratory motion of the coronary arteries is recovered from a biplane acquisition. Cardiac and respiratory phase are assigned to the images from an ECG signal synchronized to the image acquisition, and from the diaphragmatic displacement as observed in the images. The resulting motion field is decomposed into cardiac and respiratory components by fitting the field with periodic 2D parametric functions, where one dimension spans one cardiac cycle, and the second dimension spans one respiratory cycle. The method is applied to patient datasets, and an analysis of respiratory motion of the heart is presented.