Principles and Applications
Cardiac imaging is a demanding application for any noninvasive imaging modality. On the one hand, high temporal resolution is needed to virtually freeze cardiac motion and thus avoid motion artifacts in the images. On the other hand, sufficient spatial resolution—at best submillimeter—is required to adequately visualize small and complex anatomical structures like the coronary arteries. The complete...
Computed tomography (CT) imaging of the heart and the coronary anatomy requires high temporal resolution to avoid motion artifacts and to achieve sufficient spatial resolution—at best submillimeter—to adequately visualize small anatomical structures such as the coronary arteries. Furthermore, the complete heart volume has to be examined within the time of one breath-hold. First attempts to use single-slice...
Improvements in computed tomography (CT) technology such as the introduction of spiral CT, subsecond rotation times, and multislice data acquisition have stimulated cardiac CT imaging within the last decade (Fig. 1). Cardiac spiral CT started with the introduction of dedicated phase-correlated reconstruction algorithms for single-slice spiral CT in 1997 (1–3). These approaches have been generalized...
The issue of radiation dose from X-ray computed tomography (CT) has received much attention recently in both the popular media and scientific literature (1–5). This is in part due to the fact that the dose levels from CT typically exceed those from conventional radiography and fluoroscopy, and that the use of CT continues to grow. Thus, CT contributes a significant portion of the total collective...