Title
Exploiting Quasiperiodicity in Motion Correction of Free-Breathing Myocardial Perfusion MRI
Abstract
Free-breathing image acquisition is desirable in first-pass gadolinium- enhanced magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), but the breathing movements hinder the direct automatic analysis of the myocardial perfusion and qualitative readout by visual tracking. Nonrigid registration can be used to compensate for these movements but needs to deal with local contrast and intensity changes with time. We propose an automatic registration scheme that exploits the quasiperiodicity of free breathing to decouple movement from intensity change. First, we identify and register a subset of the images corresponding to the same phase of the breathing cycle. This registration step deals with small differences caused by movement but maintains the full range of intensity change. The remaining images are then registered to synthetic references that are created as a linear combination of images belonging to the already registered subset. Because of the quasiperiodic respiratory movement, the subset images are distributed evenly over time and, therefore, the synthetic references exhibit intensities similar to their corresponding unregistered images. Thus, this second registration step needs to account only for the movement. Validation experiments were performed on data obtained from six patients, three slices per patient, and the automatically obtained perfusion profiles were compared with profiles obtained by manually segmenting the myocardium. The results show that our automatic approach is well suited to compensate for the free-breathing movement and that it achieves a significant improvement in the average Pearson correlation coefficient between manually and automatically obtained perfusion profiles before (0.87 +/- 0.18) and after (0.96 +/- 0.09) registration.
Year
DOI
Venue
2010
10.1109/TMI.2010.2049270
Medical Imaging, IEEE Transactions
Keywords
Field
DocType
biomedical MRI,cardiology,image registration,image segmentation,medical image processing,motion compensation,pneumodynamics,MRI,automatic registration,average Pearson correlation coefficient,free-breathing,gadolinium-enhanced magnetic resonance imaging,image acquisition,motion correction,myocardial perfusion MRI,quasiperiodicity,respiratory movement,Heart,image registration,myocardial perfusion
Computer vision,Pearson product-moment correlation coefficient,Quasiperiodicity,Medical imaging,Motion compensation,Image segmentation,Eye tracking,Artificial intelligence,Breathing,Mathematics,Image registration
Journal
Volume
Issue
ISSN
29
8
0278-0062
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
12
0.84
14
Authors
4
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Gert Wollny1579.08
Maria J Ledesma-Carbayo2120.84
Peter Kellman3120.84
A Santos428126.52