Optimisation of reconstruction for the registration of CT liver perfusion sequences

Abstract : Objective. CT abdominal perfusion is frequently used to evaluate tumor evolution when patients are undergoing an-tiangiogenic therapy. Parameters depending on longer-term dynamics of the diffusion of the contrast medium (e. g. permeability) could help assessing the treatment efficacy. To this end, dynamic image sequences are obtained while patients breath freely. Prior to any analysis, one needs to compensate the respiratory motion. The goal of our study is to optimize the CT reconstruction parameters (filter of reconstruction, thickness of image volumes) for our registration method. We also aim at proposing relevant criteria allowing to quantify the registration quality. Methods. Registration is computed in 4 steps: z-global rigid registration, local refinements with multiresolution blockmatching, regularization and warping. Two new criteria are defined to evaluate the quality of registration: one for spatial evaluation and the other for temporal evaluation. Results. The two measures decrease after registration (58% and 10% average decrease for the best reconstruction parameters for the spatial and temporal criteria respectively) which is consistent with visual inspection of the images. They are therefore used to determine the best combination of reconstruction parameters.