Accurate Recovery of 4-D Left Ventricular Deformations Using Volumetric B-Splines Incorporating Phase Based Displacement Estimates

摘要

In this paper, an improved framework for estimation of 3-D left-ventricular deformations from tagged MRI is presented. Contiguous short- and long-axis tagged MR images are collected and are used within a 4-D B-Spline based deformable model to determine 4-D displacements and strains. An initial 4-D B-spline model fitted to sparse tag line data is first constructed by minimizing a 4-D Chamfer distance potential-based energy function for aligning isoparametric planes of the model with tag line locations; subsequently, dense virtual tag lines based on 2-D phase-based displacement estimates and the initial model are created. A final 4-D B-spline model with increased knots is fitted to the virtual tag lines. From the final model, we can extract accurate 3-D myocardial deformation fields and corresponding strain maps which are local measures of non-rigid deformation. Lagrangian strains in simulated data are derived which show improvement over our previous work. The method is also applied to 3-D tagged MRI data collected in a canine.