Cardiac CT: Advanced Architectures and Algorithms

描述（由申请人提供）：心血管疾病普遍存在，死亡率和发病率高，社会和医疗保健成本巨大。迫切需要具有显著较低辐射剂量的显著较高保真度的心脏CT，这由于技术限制而目前是不可能的。尽管心脏CT技术已经从16排到320排，从单源到双源有了显著的改进，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-工业合作伙伴关系，我们致力于推动心脏CT技术的发展，并定义下一代心脏CT系统。本项目的总体目标是开发新的心脏CT架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、分析和比较具有新颖源和扫描轨迹的新颖心脏CT架构;（2）针对所提出的心脏CT架构开发用于ROI导向扫描和动态成像的分析和迭代心脏CT重建算法;以及（3）在理论研究、数值模拟幻影实验和观察者研究。在该项目完成后，我们将挑选出最有前途的心脏CT架构和算法，以实现16 cm的覆盖范围，50 ms的时间分辨率，20 lp/cm的空间分辨率，10 HU的噪声水平，并同时为整个检查5 mSv的有效剂量，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系统的原型设计奠定了基础。该项目将在心脏CT领域实现飞跃，因为我们提出的心脏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益处。

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.