Evaluation of myocardial strain using bandpass optical flow. Comparison to harmonic phase analysis

Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) is a noninvasive imaging modality for providing information about the myocardial function, viability, and morphology. One of the most common MRI techniques is myocardial tagging, based on which deformation of the myocardium can be quantified. Different measures of regional cardiac function, e.g. strain, can thus be calculated to provide information about wall motion abnormality. In this paper, we investigate the performance of the band-pass optical flow (BPOF) method for measuring myocardial strain and compare the results to the commonly used harmonic phase (HARP) method. The results show that BPOF provides accurate strain estimates and surpasses HARP at the myocardial boundaries.