A novel temporal recovery technique to enable cone beam CT perfusion imaging using an interventional C-arm system

In the current workflow of ischemic stroke management, it is highly desirable to obtain perfusion information with the C-arm CBCT system in the interventional room. Due to hardware limitations, the data acquisition speed of the current Carm CBCT systems is relatively slow and only 7 time frames are available for a 45 s perfusion study. In this study, a novel temporal recovery method was proposed to recover contrast enhancement curves in C-arm CBCT perfusion studies. The proposed temporal recovery problem is a constrained optimization problem. Two numerical methods were used to solve the proposed problem. The feasibility of proposed temporal recovery method was validated with numerical experiments. Both solvers can achieve a satisfactory solution for the temporal recovery problem, while the result of the Bregman algorithm is more accurate than that from the CG. In vivo animal studies were used to demonstrated the improvement of the proposed method in C-arm CBCT perfusion. A stoked canine model was scanned with both C-arm CBCT and diagnostic CT. Perfusion defects can be clearly indentified from the cerebral blood flow (CBF) map of diagnostic CT perfusion. Without the temporal recovery technique, these defects can hardly be identified from the CBCT CBF map. After applying the proposed temporal recovery method, the CBCT CBF map well correlates with the CBF map from diagnostic CT.