Patent ID: 7505552

Claim:
A method for scanning a beating heart with the aid of a spiral CT system, the method comprising: spirally moving at least one focus of a focus detector system, including a multirow detector, around a patient with a feed; recording rhythm signals of the beating heart and storing the recorded signals in a temporally correlated fashion; determining at least one of a runup distance and runout distance required for complete scanning of a subarea based on measured cycles of a current rhythm signal of the patient; scanning, via an X-ray beam emanating from the at least one focus, at least the subarea of the patient including an extent in a system axis direction and including the beating heart located there, an intensity of the beams and their spatial orientation data being measured as detector output data and stored, the scanning being carried out with the runup distance and the runout distance for complete scanning of the subarea of the patient with the beating heart on the basis of the spiral scanning; and reconstructing at least one of the tomographic section image data and volume data based only on detector data that originate from a selected cycle area of the cardiac cycle; wherein the runup distance and runout distance are determined from the following equation: z pre = z post = ( T cycle T rot + 1 4 · m ) · z rot - N S · S 2 , where m=number of focus detector systems; N s =number of detector rows; S=collimated slice thickness per detector row; T cycle =measured cycle duration of the current rhythm signal; T rot =rotation time of the focus for one revolution; z pre =runup distance; z post =runout distance; z rot =feed per revolution of the focus.