A Retrospective Respiratory Gating System Based on Epipolar Consistency Conditions

: Motion artifacts of in vivo imaging, due to rapid respiration rate and respiration displacements of the mice while free-breathing, is a major challenge in micro computed tomography(micro-CT). The respiratory gating is often served for either projective images acquisition or per projection qualification, so as to eliminate the artifacts brought by in vivo motion. In this paper, we propose a novel respiratory gating method, which firstly divides one rotation cycle into a number of segments, and extracts the respiratory signal from the projective image series of current segment by the value of the epipolar consistency conditions (ECC), then in terms of the measured average respiratory period, sets next segment’s start-up time and rotation speed of the gantry for respiratory phase synchronization, and so on so forth. The gating procedure is through the whole projections of three cycles, only one among three projections at each angle is qualified by their phase value and is retained for future use for tomographic image reconstruction. In practical experiment, the ECC based gating method and the conventional hardware gating method are employed on micro CT imaging of C57BL/6 mice respectively. The result shows that, compared with the hardware based one, the proposed method not only achieve much better consistency in the projection images, but also suppresses the streak artifacts more effectively on the different parts like the breast, abdomen and head of in vivo mice.