Does a framework using both untagged and 3-D tagged MR images improve myocardial motion estimation accuracy compared to single-modality approaches in subjects undergoing cardiac MRI?
Combining untagged and 3-D tagged MR images using nonrigid registration improves the accuracy of myocardial motion estimation compared to using either modality alone.
In this paper, we present a novel technique based on nonrigid image registration for myocardial motion estimation using both untagged and 3-D tagged MR images. The novel aspect of our technique is its simultaneous usage of complementary information from both untagged and 3-D tagged MR images. To estimate the motion within the myocardium, we register a sequence of tagged and untagged MR images during the cardiac cycle to a set of reference tagged and untagged MR images at end-diastole. The similarity measure is spatially weighted to maximize the utility of information from both images. In addition, the proposed approach integrates a valve plane tracker and adaptive incompressibility into the framework. We have evaluated the proposed approach on 12 subjects. Our results show a clear improvement in terms of accuracy compared to approaches that use either 3-D tagged or untagged MR image information alone. The relative error compared to manually tracked landmarks is less than 15% throughout the cardiac cycle. Finally, we demonstrate the automatic analysis of cardiac function from the myocardial deformation fields.
Shi et al. (Wed,) studied this question.
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