Moving propagation of suspicious myocardial infarction from delayed enhanced cardiac imaging to CINE MRI using hybrid image registration

Cardiac magnetic resonance imaging has proved its effectiveness to determine the patient-specific myocardial motion/functional information via the cine imaging and to detect myocardial infarction in the delayed enhanced MRI (DE-MRI). Standard cardiac MR protocols usually acquire these two sets of images across multiple acquisitions with varying imaging slice geometry, pixel spacing and different breath-holdings, which could make the joint inspection of myocardial motion and infarction difficult. The purpose of this work is therefore to develop dedicated post-processing algorithms to register DE-MRI to corresponding cine image and propagate suspicious infarction to all cardiac phases. Suspicious infarction regions delineated in the DE-MRI can be used to define the region-of-interest for the quantification of regional wall motion abnormality. The proposed approaches are applied to 6 patients and the evaluation shows the feasibility of a joint DE-MRI and cine assessment which can yield clinically valuable outcomes.