Evaluation of a Motion Artifacts Removal Approach on Breath-hold cine-Magnetic Resonance Images of Hypertrophic Cardiomyopathy Subjects

摘要

The acquisition of ECG-gated cine magnetic resonance images of the heart is routinely performed in apnea in order to suppress the motion artifacts caused by breathing. However, many factors including the 2D nature of the acquisition and the use of different beats to acquire dynamic images, cause this kind of artifacts to appear. This paper presents the qualitative evaluation of a method aiming to remove motion artifacts in multiple-view cine images acquired on patients with hypertrophic cardiomyopathy diagnosis. The approach uses iconic registration to correct for in-plane artifacts in long-axis-view image stacks and in-plane and out-of-plane artifacts in sort-axis-view image stack. Four similarity measures were evaluated: the normalized correlation, the normalized mutual information, the sum of absolute voxel differences and the Slomka metric proposed by Slomka et al. A qualitative evaluation assessed the misalignment of different anatomical structures of the left ventricle as follows: the misalignment of the interventricular septum and the lateral wall for short-axis-view acquisitions and the misalignment between the short-axis-view image and long-axis-view images. This evaluation was performed by two experts. The correction using normalized mutual information was the best with a 70.86% of average success.