Fourier domain techniques for digital angiography of the heart

Digital angiography is widely considered simply as a method in which images taken at different times are subtracted from each other. This paper presents some techniques which are performed in the frequency domain after the application of the Fourier transform. Nonselective bypass angiograms and intravenous ventriculograms are taken as examples to show that simple procedures utilizing these techniques exhibit the advantages of improved signal-to-noise ratio in the subtraction images, reduction of motion artifacts, easy application of phase-synchronous subtraction, integration, and quantitative visualization of blood propagation. It is furthermore shown that the storage of the angiographic image sequence as Fourier coefficients leads to data compression and convenient data access in an image database.