ELEC 5644: INTRODUCTION TO BIOMEDICAL IMAGING

Improvements in Projection X-Ray and X-Ray CT Report of Reviewed Journal Papers

Ashanthi Maxworth 12/10/2013

This report was submitted for the extra credit requirement of the module ELEC 5644: Introduction to Biomedical Imaging, offered in Fall 2013.

Journal Papers on Projection X-Ray 1. Reconstruction of Coronary Arteries From a Single Rotational X-Ray Projection SequenceChristophe Blondel, Grgoire Malandain , Rgis Vaillant, and Nicholas Ayache, IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON MEDICAL IMAGING, VOL. 25, NO. 5, MAY 2006 This paper presents a new method of reconstructing the coronary arteries in the three dimensional domain. According to the World Health Organization, coronary disease is the main

course of death in the world. For the diagnosis and treatment for the heard diseases, the most
prevalent method is angiography. In this paper it discusses about the X-Ray angiography but not the Magnetic Resonance Imaging based angiography. In angiography a radiopaque fluid or a contrast agent, is inserted into the coronary vessels and then the structure is imaged from different angles. Due to the contrast agent introduced, the arteries are clearly visible in the image. One main drawback of this method is, angiography is severely suffers from angle dependency. Therefore the method that this paper presents is done in a single projection sequence rather than using multiple projection sequences. When it comes to cardiac imaging, there are two main issues existing. One is the motion due to respiration and the other is the cardiac motion. Due to these two reasons, the angiographic images are getting blurred and most of the time, a lot of images are wasted. This paper presents a method of constructing the coronary arteries in the 3D space eliminating the above mentioned drawbacks in conventional angiography. The proposed method consists of three main steps; 1. 3D reconstruction of coronary artery centerlines 2. Estimation of 4D motion of 3D lines 3. 3D tomographic reconstruction In the first step the centerlines of the arteries will be extracted. It is based on a very practical assumption that even though the arteries are expanding and contracting with respect to time, the center lines of the arteries will not be changed significantly. The 3D centerline extraction process itself consists of three sub- steps. a. Vessel enhancement
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b. 2D centerline extraction c. Multicular matching In the step of vessel enhancement the expansion of the vessels are compared with respect to the reference images. The reference images are taken during a single cardiac phase. The reference images can be affected by the cardiac motion, but they should not be affected by the respiratory motion. In this paper for the detection of vessel enhancement, Hessian Filter based approach was used.

During the 2D centerline extraction process, centerlines are extracted by minimizing the
Euclidian Distance. And then the image had undergone a process of Hysteresis Thresholding to remove the artifacts due to the elements other than the anatomical structures. In multicular matching process the asymmetric structures are matched. In the second main step of the introduced method, which is estimation of 4D motion of 3D lines, motion parameterization and motion estimation were done. Any object is located in the 3D space and the fourth dimension is the time. In other words, in this step, the motion of the coronary arteries with respect to time is measured. In the third main step of 3D tomographic reconstruction step, the background artifacts and the noise was removed. And the motion of the coronary arteries is compensated. According to the results given in the paper, the proposed method is a promising route for the accurate estimation of coronary arteries and the motion compensation of them due to respiratory and cardiac motions. Although it is not mentioned in the paper, one main advantage of this method is all the calibrations are done after the image is acquired, and the imaging technique is non-invasive. Hence the overall method is non-invasive.

2. Motion Correction for Coronary Stent Reconstruction From Rotational X-ray Projection Sequences Batrice Perrenot, Rgis Vaillant, Rmy Prost, Grard Finet, Philippe Douek, and Franoise Peyrin, IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON MEDICAL IMAGING, VOL. 26, NO. 10, OCTOBER 2007 This paper is also based on cardiac imaging. As mentioned for the above paper, in this case also the authors address the difficulties in cardiac imaging due to respiratory motion and the cardiac motion. The difference is in this case rather than going for an analytical approach, the authors have selected a practical approach.

In the method introduced in this paper, a stent with two radiopaque marker balls is introduced
into the coronary vessel. Due to the radio opacity of the marker balls it is easy to identify the two ends of the stent, and hence the orientation or the deformation of the vessel. Compared to the method in the first paper, this method is invasive. The authors of this paper have done the trials of this method with Pigs. According to the results obtained, this method shows very good technique of imaging the cardiac arteries.

3. Design and Development of a New Multi-Projection X-Ray System for Chest Imaging Amarpreet S. Chawla, Sarah Boyce, Lacey Washington, H. Page McAdams, and Ehsan Samei IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON NUCLEAR SCIENCE, VOL. 56, NO. 1, FEBRUARY 2009 This paper addresses the issue of chest imaging for the early detection of lung cancers. According to the paper, lung cancer is the second major cause of death. One reason for most of the deaths is the inability to detect the cancer at an early stage, and the patients seek medical treatment at a later stage of the cancer.

When dealing with lung imaging there are several major difficulties such as;
1. Respiratory motion 2. The location of many anatomical structures within a small space The first issue can be avoided if the imaging is done within a single breath hold. But the second issue cannot be easily eliminated. Within the chest cavity several important organs are located. And the separation between these organs are very low, so that once an image is taken it is difficult to discriminate the anatomical structures.

Another issue apart from the two mentioned above is that in order to obtain good images
sometimes the dose of X-ray should be increased. Increasing the X-ray dose is not good since it can damage living cells. Therefore it is always suitable to take multiple projections within a single sequence. In the method proposed by this paper, the projection X-ray imaging machine is moved horizontally and vertically in a very high speed and several images are acquired. With multiple imaging done in this method, it is easy to identify the structures separately. Also another advantage of this method is more details can be identified than with a single

projection.
This imagining machine has been implemented in the Bio-Medical Research laboratory in Duke University. In the paper the given results are simulation results that the authors have taken with a chest phantom. According to the results shown in the paper this method is a very good non -invasive method for chest imaging.

Journal Papers in X-Ray Computed Tomography 1. Quantifying Admissible Undersampling for Sparsity-Exploiting Iterative Image Reconstruction in X-Ray CT Jakob S. Jrgensen, Emil Y. Sidky, and Xiaochuan Pan IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON MEDICAL IMAGING, VOL. 32, NO. 2, FEBRUARY 2013 For computed tomography image reconstruction, there is a minimum requirement of sampling. If the image is spatially sampled at a high frequency a better image can be obtained while reconstruction. In some cases having sufficient samples cannot be achieved. Especially when the

image or the object being imaged is very large, having sufficient sampling is a process which is
computationally expensive. When the sampling level is reduced or when the image is subjected to undersampling, in the reconstruction process the reconstructed image will be blurred. In other words, the reconstructed image would be low in quality. In this paper the authors have introduced a new method of reconstructing an image in undersampled conditions. In the proposed method the Root Mean Square Error is minimized iteratively between the current image and the reference image. The RMSE is being iteratively minimized until it drops the zero. The proposed method is still under the simulation stage, and no clinical trials have been done yet. According to the results obtained with the phantoms, it can be said that this method is very promising and can be used in the near future to reduce the computational overhead and the processing data load. In the paper there are results obtained with normal undersampling, undersampling plus this iterative method and images with sufficient sampling.

The image obtained with normal undersampling is low in quality once it is reconstructed. But
when this iterative method is used with the normal undersampling then the resulting image is the same in quality as the image with sufficient sampling.

2. An Analytical Geometric Calibration Method for Circular Cone-Beam Geometry Jingyan Xu and Benjamin M. W. Tsui, IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON MEDICAL IMAGING, VOL. 32, NO. 9, SEPTEMBER 2013 This paper proposes a method of calibrating the cone beam geometry. Cone beam geometry is a method of imaging in a way that the imaging volume is iteratively determined as a volume of a cone. This beam technique is complicated compared to the parallel beam or fan beam techniques. The reason is in this case the number of parameters that has to be estimated, in each iteration is large. This paper presents a novel method of estimating those parameters iteratively based on minimizing the Root Mean Square Error. The approach used in this paper is completely analytical. According to the author of this reports opinion, this paper addresses only one method of beam projection, rather than giving a unique calibration approach for all the beam transmitting techniques. Therefore this paper is applicable only at the situations where the circular beam techniques are being used, the universal applicability of this paper is less.

But when compared with the parallel beam geometry and fan beam geometry, the accuracy that
can be achieved with the circular cone beam geometry is high. Due to the circular geometry all 360 degrees can be covered. And due to the cone shape the focusing on to the actual object is high. The issue with the existing circular cone beam technique is due to the large number of parameters, going from one iteration to another takes a lot of time. Therefore there will a tradeoff in all the situations, either accuracy or the time. But with this method, that drawbacks can be eliminated. According to the results shown in the original paper with different data sets, this approach shows very good results when there is no noise present in the original image. That can be actually validated since in this case blind signal processing method is used, and those methods work nicely for noise free environments.

3. Adaptive Projection Selection for Computed Tomography M. Ariful Haque, M. Omair Ahmad, M. N. S. Swamy, Md. Kamrul Hasan, and Soo Yeol Lee IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON IMAGE PROCESSING, VOL. 22, NO. 12, DECEMBER 2013 This is a very new and a very interesting paper. This gives the implementation of a method which will adapt the projection view accordingly. Generally for the X-ray computed tomography, there are multiple projections from different angles. The issue with that technique is the patient is exposed to X-rays for a long time. In other words the X-ray does is high. And the other issue is

some of the images does not contain any information. Therefore those images have to be
discarded. Therefore there is wastage of images involved with the general X-ray CT technique. The proposed method in this paper can be implemented in two ways. One way is the wavelet based approach. In that approach first a reference image is taken. A reference image is an image with no noise. The actual image is then analyzed by a wavelet transform. A wavelet transform a a technique used to preserve both the time domain and frequency domain characteristics of a signal. The transformation is done with wavelets on different time scales. In the paper there is a term mentioned as the spectral richness. Once there is an edge like structure present in the image the spectral richness will be high. In other words, spectral richness is the difference between the image obtained at that time and the reference image. And the step size for the next iteration is adjusted in such a way that the step size is proportional to the spectral richness. Accordingly the final image is constructed iteratively. In the second method instead of using the wavelet based approach, a blind signal approach is used. In that method, an initial step size is defined. And the step size for the next iterations has been adjusted by minimizing the Root Mean Square Error between the current approximation and the previous approximation. The iteration process has to be followed until the RMSE value goes to zero. According to the paper, implementation of the first method is easier than implementing the second method. According to the results presented in the paper it can be said that with this method, the X-ray CT method can be optimized.