Cardiac CT: Advanced Architectures and Algorithms

描述(申请人提供)：心血管疾病普遍存在，死亡率和发病率很高，造成巨大的社会和医疗成本。迫切需要更高的保真度和更低的辐射剂量，但由于技术上的限制，目前这是不可能的。虽然心脏CT技术已经从16排探测器显著提高到320排探测器，从单源到双源，但在时间分辨率、空间分辨率、辐射剂量等方面仍然存在技术挑战。基于弗吉尼亚理工大学和GE全球研究中心(GEGR)之间理想的学术-产业合作伙伴关系，我们有动力大幅提升心脏CT的最新水平，并定义下一代心脏CT系统。该项目的总体目标是开发新的心脏CT结构和相关的重建算法，并定义下一代心脏CT系统。具体目标是：(1)设计、分析和比较具有新来源和扫描轨迹的新型心脏CT结构；(2)为所提出的心脏CT结构开发面向ROI的扫描和动态成像的解析和迭代重建算法；以及(3)在理论研究、数值模拟、模型实验和观察者研究中评估和验证所提出的结构和算法。项目完成后，我们将挑选出最有希望的心脏CT架构和算法，在整个检查过程中同时实现16 cm覆盖、50ms时间分辨率、20lp/cm空间分辨率、10HU噪声水平和5mSv有效剂量，并提供详细的规格和性能评估，为第二阶段项目中的下一代心脏CT系统原型奠定基础。该项目将在心脏CT方面取得巨大飞跃，因为我们建议的心脏CT技术将显著提高诊断性能，并带来影响6180万美国人的重大治疗效益。

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Cardiovascular diseases are pervasive with high mortality and morbidity at tremendous social and healthcare costs. There are urgent needs for significantly higher fidelity cardiac CT with substantially lower radiation dose, which is currently not possible because of technical limitations. Although cardiac CT technology has improved significantly from 16 to 320 detector rows and from single to dual source, there remain technical challenges in terms of temporal resolution, spatial resolution, radiation dose, and so on. Based on an ideal academic-industrial partnership between Virginia Tech and the GE Global Research Center (GEGR), we are motivated to advance the state-of-the-art in cardiac CT dramatically and define the next generation cardiac CT system. The overall goal of this project is to develop novel cardiac CT architectures and the associated reconstruction algorithms, and define the next-generation cardiac CT system. The specific aims are to (1) design, analyze and compare novel cardiac CT architectures with novel sources and scanning trajectories; (2) develop analytic and iterative cardiac CT reconstruction algorithms for ROI-oriented scanning and dynamic imaging for the proposed cardiac CT architectures; and (3) evaluate and validate the proposed architectures and algorithms in theoretical studies, numerical simulations, phantom experiments and observer studies. On completion of this project, we will have singled out the most promising cardiac CT architecture and algorithms to achieve 16cm coverage, 50ms temporal resolution, 20lp/cm spatial resolution, 10HU noise level, and 5mSv effective dose simultaneously for the entire examination, with detailed specifications and performance evaluation, setting the stage for prototyping a next-generation cardiac CT system in a Phase-II project. This project will make a quantum leap in cardiac CT, in the sense that our proposed cardiac CT technology will enable significantly better diagnostic performance and bring major therapeutic benefits that affect 61.8 million Americans.