Title
Anatomy-Aware Cardiac Motion Estimation
Abstract
Cardiac motion estimation is critical to the assessment of cardiac function. Myocardium feature tracking (FT) can directly estimate cardiac motion from cine MRI, which requires no special scanning procedure. However, current deep learning-based FT methods may result in unrealistic myocardium shapes since the learning is solely guided by image intensities without considering anatomy. On the other hand, motion estimation through learning is challenging because ground-truth motion fields are almost impossible to obtain. In this study, we propose a novel Anatomy-Aware Tracker (AATracker) for cardiac motion estimation that preserves anatomy by weak supervision. A convolutional variational autoencoder (VAE) is trained to encapsulate realistic myocardium shapes. A baseline dense motion tracker is trained to approximate the motion fields and then refined to estimate anatomy-aware motion fields under the weak supervision from the VAE. We evaluate the proposed method on long-axis cardiac cine MRI, which has more complex myocardium appearances and motions than short-axis. Compared with other methods, AATracker significantly improves the tracking performance and provides visually more realistic tracking results, demonstrating the effectiveness of the proposed weakly-supervision scheme in cardiac motion estimation.
Year
DOI
Venue
2020
10.1007/978-3-030-59861-7_16
MLMI@MICCAI
DocType
Citations 
PageRank 
Conference
0
0.34
References 
Authors
0
6
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Pingjun Chen100.34
Xiao Chen211.37
Eric Z. Chen301.01
Haichao Yu4163.02
Terrence Chen541333.69
Shanhui Sun69511.82