Left ventricle volume measurements in cardiac micro-CT: The impact of radiation dose and contrast agent

Micro-CT-based cardiac function estimation in small animals requires measurement of left ventricle (LV) volume at multiple time points during the cardiac cycle. Measurement accuracy depends on the image resolution, its signal and noise properties, and the analysis procedure. This work compares the accuracy of the Otsu thresholding and a region sampled binary mixture approach, for live mouse LV volume measurement using 100 μm resolution datasets. We evaluate both analysis methods after varying the volume of injected contrast agent and the number of projections used for CT reconstruction with a goal of permitting reduced levels of both X-ray and contrast agent doses.