Volumetric deformation compensation in CUDA for coding of dynamic cardiac images

A new approach for volumetric deformation compensation in temporally predictive coding of dynamic medical heart images is presented. Instead of using conventional vectors, motion is represented by deformation values to model 3-D muscle contractions. In this way, estimated motion is more homogeneous among the image domain and predictions do not contain disturbing blocking artifacts making the approach suitable also for non-block-based transform coding. It is shown that with equal numbers of motion values the method can achieve prediction accuracies similar to cube-based motion estimation. The run time of the described parallel implementation in Nvidia CUDA is shown to be shorter than for an equivalent implementation of cube-based motion estimation.