Temporal alignment of time varying MRI datasets for high resolution medical visualization

Abstract

Four-dimensional (4D) visualization of medical data, which entails the addition of time as the fourth dimension to 3D data, is fast gaining ground as a tool for diagnosis and surgical planning by medical practitioners. However, current medical image acquisition techniques do not support high-resolution 4D capture. Instead, multiple 3D datasets are acquired and a temporal relation is computed between these datasets in order to align them in time. In past work we presented a method of temporal alignment of MRI datasets to generate high-resolution medical data, which can be extended to 4D visualization. In this work, we present the details of our temporal alignment algorithm and also present comparative analysis in order to highlight the advantages of our method. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2006.