3D fusion of cine and late-enhanced cardiac magnetic resonance images

A procedure to fuse the information of short-axis cine and late enhanced magnetic resonance images is presented. First a coherent 3D reconstruction of the images is obtained by object-based interpolation of the information of contiguous slices in stacked short-axis cine acquisitions and by the correction of slice misalignments with the aid of a set of reference long-axis slices. Then, late enhanced stacked images are also interpolated and aligned with the anatomical information. Thus, the complementary information provided by both modalities is combined in a common frame of reference and in a nearly isotropic grid, which is not possible with existing fusion procedures. Numerical improvement is established by comparing the distances between unaligned and aligned manual segmentations of the myocardium in both modalities. Finally, a set of snapshots illustrate the improvement in the information overlap and the ability to reconstruct the gradient in the long-axis.