Patent ID: 7693253

Claim:
A method for taking X-ray CT pictures of a patient's beating heart using at least one X-ray source located relative to and around the patient to scan the patient, comprising: detecting, via at least one detector, an attenuation of the X-rays and outputting detected data to a control and arithmetic unit; generating a synthetic clock signal that is not based on signals derived from the patient's beating heart; outputting the synthetic clock signal at a frequency that corresponds to a typical heart rate of the patient; reconstructing, during each cycle phase of the synthetic clock signal, test volume data records of the heart at a number of different phases of the synthetic clock over a complete scan, each test volume data record being associated with its respective phase and its z-position; calculating, over a prescribed image area, correlation values between test volume data records that are temporally neighboring and spatially identical or at least belong to the same slice plane, entering the calculated correlation values in a spatiotemporal matrix, and searching for maxima of the correlation values; subsequently calculating final volume data records from the detector data records from which the test volume data records, that led to correlation maxima, originate to obtain a final reconstruction of the data; and displaying a picture of the patient's heart based on the final reconstruction of the data.