CORONARY ARTERY MOTION MODELING

A method for tracking coronary artery motion includes constructing (11) a centerline model of a vascular structure in a base phase image in a sequence of 2D images of coronary arteries acquired over a cardiac phase, computing (12), for each pixel in a region-of-interest in each subsequent image, a velocity vector that represent a change in position between the subsequent image and base phase image, calculating (13) positions of control points in each phase using the velocity vectors, and applying (14) PCA to a P×2N data matrix XT constructed from position vectors (x, y) of N centerline control points for P phases to identify d eigenvectors corresponding to the largest eigenvalues of XXT to obtain a d-dimensional linear motion model {circumflex over (α)}p, in which a centerline model for a new image at phase p+1 is estimated by adding {circumflex over (α)}p to each centerline control point of a previous frame at phase p.