Reconstruction of 3D cardiac MR images from 2D slices using directional total variation

Abstract

Cardiac MRI allows for the acquisition of high resolution images of the heart. Long acquisition times of MRI make it impractical to image the full heart in 3D at high resolution. As a result, multiple 2D images are commonly acquired with a slice thickness greater than the in-plane resolution. One way of achieving isotropic high-resolution images is to apply post-processing techniques such as super-resolution to produce high resolution images from low resolution input. We use short-axis stacks as well as orthogonal long-axis views in a super-resolution framework, constraining the reconstruction using the contrast independent directional total variation algorithm to produce a high resolution 3D reconstruction with isotropic resolution. The 3D reconstruction retains the contrast of the short-axis stack, but incorporates the edge information from both the short-axis and the long-axis stacks. Results show improved reconstructions, with a segmentation voxel misclassification rate of 3.51% as opposed to 4.27% using linear interpolation.