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Cardiovascular disease (CVD), also known as heart disease, is the leading cause of
death globally. About eight million Americans are now suffering from CVD with 2,400
dying each day. The gold standard for evaluating CVD, catheter coronary angiography,
is invasive and expensive. An alternative technique, computed tomography angiography
(CTA), is less invasive, relatively inexpensive, and faster. However, this emerging diagnostic tool suffers from limited temporal resolution resulting in cardiac motion artifacts.
The overarching goal of this work is to improve the diagnostic quality and reduce the radiation dose of cardiac CTA imaging by developing novel gating strategies that optimize prospective gating.
To minimize the effect of cardiac motion, cardiac CTA data acquisition requires triggering when cardiac motion is minimal within the cardiac cycle. On the other hand, the low diagnostic yield of CCA raises the concern of undergoing unnecessary invasive tests for people at low to intermediate risk of CVD.