Four dimensional B-spline based motion analysis of tagged cardiac MR images

In recent years, with development of new MRI techniques, noninvasive evaluation of global and regional cardiac function is becoming a reality. One of the methods used for this purpose is MRI tagging. In tagging, spatially encoded magnetic saturation planes, tags, are created within tissues. These act as temporary markers and move with the tissue. In cardiac tagging, tag deformation pattern provides useful qualitative and quantitative information about the functional properties of underlying myocardium. The measured deformation of a single tag plane contains only unidirectional information of the past motion. In order to track the motion of a cardiac material point, this sparse, single dimensional data has to be combined with similar information gathered from other tag sets and all time frames. Previously, several methods have been developed which rely on the specific geometry of the chambers. Here, we employ an image plane based, simple cartesian coordinate system and provide a stepwise method to describe the heart motion using a four-dimensional tensor product of B-splines. The proposed displacement and forward motion fields exhibited sub-pixel accuracy. Since our motion fields are parametric and based on an image plane based coordinate system, trajectories or other derived values (velocity, acceleration, strains...) can be calculated for any desired point on the MRI images. This method is sufficiently general so that the motion of any tagged structure can be tracked.