A 3D space-time motion evaluation for image registration in digital subtraction angiography

In modern clinical practice, Digital Subtraction Angiography (DSA) is a pow erful technique for the visualization of blood vessels in a sequence of X-r ay images. A serious problem encountered in this technique is the presence of artifacts due to patient motion. The resulting artifacts frequently lead to misdiagnosis or rejection of a DSA image sequence. In this paper, a new technique for removing both global and local motion artifacts is presented . It is based on a 3D space-time motion evaluation for separating pixels ch anging values because of motion from those changing values because of contr ast flow. This technique is proved to be very efficient to correct for pati ent motion artifacts and is computationally cheap. Experimental results wit h several clinical data sets show that this technique is very fast and resu lts in higher quality images. (C) 2001 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights res erved.