title: A parameterization of deformation fields for diffeomorphic image registration and its application to myocardial delineation.
abstract: This study investigates a new parameterization of deformation fields for image registration. Instead of standard displacements, this parameterization describes a deformation field with its transformation Jacobian and curl of end velocity field. It has two important features which make it appealing to image registration: 1) it relaxes the need of an explicit regularization term and the corresponding ad hoc weight in the cost functional; 2) explicit constraints on transformation Jacobian such as topology preserving and incompressibility constraints are straightforward to impose in a unified framework. In addition, this parameterization naturally describes a deformation field in terms of radial and rotational components, making it especially suited for processing cardiac data. We formulate diffeomorphic image registration as a constrained optimization problem which we solve with a step-then-correct strategy. The effectiveness of the algorithm is demonstrated with several examples and a comprehensive evaluation of myocardial delineation over 120 short-axis cardiac cine MRIs acquired from 20 subjects. It shows competitive performance in comparison to two recent segmentation based approaches.
authors.affiliation: Department of Medical Biophysics, UWO, London, Ontario.
authors.forename: Hua-Mei
authors.initials: HM
authors.lastname: Chen
authors.forename: Aashish
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Goela
authors.forename: Gregory J
authors.initials: GJ
authors.lastname: Garvin
authors.forename: Shuo
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Li
mesh_terms: D000465:Algorithms; D006321:Heart / Q000033:anatomy & histology*; D006801:Humans; D007089:Image Enhancement / Q000379:methods; D007090:Image Interpretation, Computer-Assisted / Q000379:methods*; D019028:Magnetic Resonance Imaging, Cine / Q000379:methods*; D010363:Pattern Recognition, Automated / Q000379:methods*; D015203:Reproducibility of Results; D012680:Sensitivity and Specificity; D013382:Subtraction Technique