Generation of realistic 4D synthetic CSPAMM tagged MR sequences for benchmarking cardiac motion tracking algorithms

Abstract

This paper introduces a novel pipeline for synthesizing realistic 3D+t CSPAMM cardiac tagged magnetic resonance (MR) images. The proposed framework is based on the combination of an electromechanical model for generating cardiac deformation fields and a template tagging recording for assigning realistic voxel intensities. We developed a spatio-temporal alignment strategy for mapping voxel positions in the simulation space to the template recording space. As a preliminary result, we generated a synthetic dataset of a normal heart, and further compared the performance of two state-of-the-art cardiac motion tracking algorithms using this synthetic data. In this study, we aim at showing the capability of the proposed pipeline to simulate realistic cardiac tagged MR images, and its extension to more synthetic cases especially pathological ones are currently left to future work.