Measured and synthetic rigid head motion datasets via generative model for motion simulation and compensation in medical imaging.
Purpose Rigid head motion during interventional C-arm cone-beam CT (CBCT) is a major source of image degradation. Learning-based motion estimation requires realistic training data, but ground-truth motion is scarce, limiting direct validation of compensation trajectories. We address this gap with an open resource consisting of tracked real motion and pregenerated synthetic motion, along with a pretrained variational autoencoder (VAE) to generate larger ground-truth datasets. Approach Using stereo optical tracking, we recorded rigid 6-DoF head motion trajectories from 25 volunteers lying head-first supine on an examination table, resembling a clinical setting. After data preprocessing, we trained a VAE on 120 sequences of 10 s at 30 Hz. Motion is represented in patient-centered coordinates to support transformation to arbitrary scan geometries. Similarity between measured and generated data is assessed via distributional distances, correlation metrics, low-dimensional embeddings, and a posthoc analysis of the learned latent space. Results Evaluated based on 120 generated sequences, the trained VAE is capable of producing diverse 6-DoF trajectories that preserve real-world data correlation structure. Distributional and frequency-domain metrics, along with t-SNE embeddings, show overlap between real and synthetic samples without evidence of mode collapse or training data replication. Conclusions This work provides an openly released resource comprising measured trajectories, a synthetic dataset, and pretrained VAE weights together with full training and evaluation code, combining rigid 6-DoF head motion measured in a realistic C-arm setting with a retrainable generative model. It is intended to support reproducible development, benchmarking, and comparison of head motion estimation methods in medical imaging modalities.