Phase-based registration of cardiac tagged MR images using anatomical deformation model

We developed a phase-based registration method applied to cardiac motion and strain quantification from tagged MR images. A parametric deformation model defined in an anatomical space of the heart was incorporated into the registration framework. The model parameters were optimized by minimizing phase-based similarity criteria. The proposed method was compared to a previously developed algorithm where point-wise HARP tracking results were regularized a posteriori by the same parametric deformation model. On synthetic data, the two methods achieved similar results on motion and circumferential strain accuracies. However, our method achieved better accuracy on longitudinal strain. On volunteer data, our method gave smaller median and variance values on tracking errors with statistical significance.