A 3D space-time motion evaluation for image registration in digital subtraction angiography.

In modern clinical practice, Digital Subtraction Angiography (DSA) is a powerful technique for the visualization of blood vessels in a sequence of X-ray images. A serious problem encountered in this technique is the presence of artifacts due to patient motion. The resulting artifacts frequently lead to misdiagnosis or rejection of a DSA image sequence. In this paper, a new technique for removing both global and local motion artifacts is presented. It is based on a 3D space-time motion evaluation for separating pixels changing values because of motion from those changing values because of contrast flow. This technique is proved to be very efficient to correct for patient motion artifacts and is computationally cheap. Experimental results with several clinical data sets show that this technique is very fast and results in higher quality images.