Cardiac motion estimation from tagged MRI using 3D-HARP and NURBS volumetric model

Abstract

Concerning analysis of tagged cardiac MR images, harmonic phase (HARP) is a promising technique with the largest potential for clinical use in terms of rapidity and automation without tags detection and tracking. However, it is usually applied to 2D images and only provides "apparent motion" information. In this paper, HARP is integrated with a nonuniform rational B-spline (NURBS) volumetric model to densely reconstruct 3D motion of left ventricle (LV). The NURBS model represents anatomy of LV compactly, and displacement information that HARP provides within short-axis and long-axis images drives the model to deform. After estimating the motion at each phase, we smooth the NURBS models temporally to achieve a 4D continuous timevarying representation of LV motion. Experimental results on in vivo data show that the proposed strategy could estimate 3D motion of LV rapidly and effectively benefiting from both HARP and NURBS model. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2007.