Deformable Motion Tracking of Cardiac Structures (DEMOTRACS) for improved MR imaging

The speed and quality of imaging cardiac structures (coronary arteries, cardiac valves etc) in MR can be improved by tracking and predicting their motion in MR images. The problem is challenging not only due to the complex motion of these structures that significantly changes the appearance of the region of interest, but also the ability to track at different spatial and temporal resolutions depending on the application. We have developed a multiple-template based tracking approach to track the cardiac structures in MR images. The algorithm has two novel features. First a bidirectional coordinate-descent algorithm is derived to improve accuracy and performance of tracking. Second we propose a method for choosing an optimal set of templates for tracking. The efficacy of the algorithm has been validated by tracking the coronary artery and cardiac valves reliably and accurately in thousands of high resolution cine and low-resolution real-time MR images.