High temporal resolution time-resolved C-arm cone-beam CT imaging using a multi-sweep data acquisition scheme

Temporal resolution in time-resolved cone-beam CT (TR-CBCT) imaging is often limited by the time needed to acquire a complete dataset for image reconstruction. With the recent developments of performing nearly limited-view artifact-free reconstruction from data in a limited-view angle range and a prior image, temporal resolution of TR-CBCT imaging can be improved from the initial 0.2 frame per second (fps) to 1 fps which indicated a factor of five improvement in temporal resolution. In this paper, a new technique was introduced to further improve temporal resolution from 1.0 fps to about 7.5 fps which indicates a factor of more than 30 times improvement in temporal resolution for slow C-arm CBCT acquistions. This new technique was developed for multi-sweep data acquistion protocol and it is referred to as enhanced SMART-RECON (eSMART-RECON) in this paper. Numerical phantoms with ground truth and in vivo human subject data were used to validate the proposed eSMART-RECON method.