Quantitative comparison of tracking methods for motion analysis in tagged MRI

Myocardial tagging in magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) has shown great potential for noninvasive measurement of the motion of a beating heart. A critical issue in exploiting this technology in practice is the availability of robust and accurate methods for tag tracking. In this paper we quantitatively evaluate and compare four motion analysis methods that are frequently used in practice, based on optical flow, harmonic phase MRI, B-snake grids, and non-rigid registration techniques. Experiments on realistic synthetic images and data from three different (pre)clinical experiments show that nonrigid registration methods yield the highest accuracy and robustness among the considered methods.