A Supervised Image Registration Approach for Late Gadolinium Enhanced MRI and Cine Cardiac MRI Using Convolutional Neural Networks

Abstract

Late gadolinium enhanced (LGE) cardiac magnetic resonance (CMR) imaging is the current gold standard for assessing myocardium viability for patients diagnosed with myocardial infarction, myocarditis or cardiomyopathy. This imaging method enables the identification and quantification of myocardial tissue regions that appear hyper-enhanced. However, the delineation of the myocardium is hampered by the reduced contrast between the myocardium and the left ventricle (LV) blood-pool due to the gadolinium-based contrast agent. The balanced-Steady State Free Precession (bSSFP) cine CMR imaging provides high resolution images with superior contrast between the myocardium and the LV blood-pool. Hence, the registration of the LGE CMR images and the bSSFP cine CMR images is a vital step for accurate localization and quantification of the compromised myocardial tissue. Here, we propose a Spatial Transformer Network (STN) inspired convolutional neural network (CNN) architecture to perform supervised registration of bSSFP cine CMR and LGE CMR images. We evaluate our proposed method on the 2019 Multi-Sequence Cardiac Magnetic Resonance Segmentation Challenge (MS-CMRSeg) dataset and use several evaluation metrics, including the center-to-center LV and right ventricle (RV) blood-pool distance, and the contour-to-contour blood-pool and myocardium distance between the LGE and bSSFP CMR images. Specifically, we showed that our registration method reduced the bSSFP to LGE LV blood-pool center distance from 3.28 mm before registration to 2.27 mm post registration and RV blood-pool center distance from 4.35 mm before registration to 2.52 mm post registration. We also show that the average surface distance (ASD) between bSSFP and LGE is reduced from 2.53 mm to 2.09 mm, 1.78 mm to 1.40 mm and 2.42 mm to 1.73 mm for LV blood-pool, LV myocardium and RV blood-pool, respectively.