title: Myocardial motion estimation of tagged cardiac magnetic resonance images using tag motion constraints and multi-level b-splines interpolation.
abstract: Myocardial motion estimation of tagged cardiac magnetic resonance (TCMR) images is of great significance in clinical diagnosis and the treatment of heart disease. Currently, the harmonic phase analysis method (HARP) and the local sine-wave modeling method (SinMod) have been proven as two state-of-the-art motion estimation methods for TCMR images, since they can directly obtain the inter-frame motion displacement vector field (MDVF) with high accuracy and fast speed. By comparison, SinMod has better performance over HARP in terms of displacement detection, noise and artifacts reduction. However, the SinMod method has some drawbacks: 1) it is unable to estimate local displacements larger than half of the tag spacing; 2) it has observable errors in tracking of tag motion; and 3) the estimated MDVF usually has large local errors. To overcome these problems, we present a novel motion estimation method in this study. The proposed method tracks the motion of tags and then estimates the dense MDVF by using the interpolation. In this new method, a parameter estimation procedure for global motion is applied to match tag intersections between different frames, ensuring specific kinds of large displacements being correctly estimated. In addition, a strategy of tag motion constraints is applied to eliminate most of errors produced by inter-frame tracking of tags and the multi-level b-splines approximation algorithm is utilized, so as to enhance the local continuity and accuracy of the final MDVF. In the estimation of the motion displacement, our proposed method can obtain a more accurate MDVF compared with the SinMod method and our method can overcome the drawbacks of the SinMod method. However, the motion estimation accuracy of our method depends on the accuracy of tag lines detection and our method has a higher time complexity.
authors.affiliation: School of Computer Science and Technology, Huazhong University of Science and Technology, Wuhan, Hubei, China; Key Laboratory of Education ministry for Image Processing and Intelligence Control, Wuhan, Hubei, China. Electronic address: hongliu@hust.edu.cn.
authors.forename: Hong
authors.initials: H
authors.lastname: Liu
authors.affiliation: School of Computer Science and Technology, Huazhong University of Science and Technology, Wuhan, Hubei, China; Key Laboratory of Education ministry for Image Processing and Intelligence Control, Wuhan, Hubei, China; Hubei Key Laboratory of Medical Information Analysis and Tumor Diagnosis and Treatment. Electronic address: ym620@hust.edu.cn.
authors.forename: Meng
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Yan
authors.affiliation: School of Computer Science and Technology, Huazhong University of Science and Technology, Wuhan, Hubei, China; Key Laboratory of Education ministry for Image Processing and Intelligence Control, Wuhan, Hubei, China. Electronic address: Enmin_Song@126.com.
authors.forename: Enmin
authors.initials: E
authors.lastname: Song
authors.affiliation: State Grid Hubei Electric Power Research Institute, Wuhan, Hubei, China. Electronic address: wangjie8406@163.com.
authors.forename: Jie
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Wang
authors.affiliation: School of Computer Science and Technology, Huazhong University of Science and Technology, Wuhan, Hubei, China; School of Information and Safety Engineering, Zhongnan University of Economics and Law, Wuhan, Hubei, China. Electronic address: icedlitchi@163.com.
authors.forename: Qian
authors.initials: Q
authors.lastname: Wang
authors.affiliation: School of Computer Science and Technology, Huazhong University of Science and Technology, Wuhan, Hubei, China; Key Laboratory of Education ministry for Image Processing and Intelligence Control, Wuhan, Hubei, China. Electronic address: jrc@hust.edu.cn.
authors.forename: Renchao
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Jin
authors.affiliation: School of Computer Science and Technology, Huazhong University of Science and Technology, Wuhan, Hubei, China; Key Laboratory of Education ministry for Image Processing and Intelligence Control, Wuhan, Hubei, China. Electronic address: Lianghaijin@hust.edu.cn.
authors.forename: Lianghai
authors.initials: L
authors.lastname: Jin
authors.affiliation: Center for Machine Vision and Security Research, Kennesaw State University, Marietta, GA, USA; Sino-US Intelligent Information Processing Joint Laboratory, Anyang Normal University, Anyang, Henan, China. Electronic address: chung1@kennesaw.edu.
authors.forename: Chih-Cheng
authors.initials: CC
authors.lastname: Hung
mesh_terms: D000465:Algorithms; D016477:Artifacts; D006321:Heart / Q000000981:diagnostic imaging*; D006801:Humans; D007091:Image Processing, Computer-Assisted; D008279:Magnetic Resonance Imaging; D009038:Motion
keywords: Local sine-wave modeling; Multi-level b-splines approximation; Myocardial motion estimation; Tag motion constraining; Tagged cardiac magnetic resonance image