Cardiac motion analysis from cine MR sequences using non-rigid registration techniques

The objective of this work is to evaluate the feasibility of using non-rigid registration techniques to estimates myocardial motion from CINE-MR images without user interaction. Myocardial displacement field was obtained using a pair-wise non rigid registration technique that computes incremental motion for every consecutive pair of images in the sequence. We use a semi-local parametric deformation model that balances both local and global motion estimation. This analytical representation provides an excellent frame work to derive myocardial function parameters such as strain. In order to assess the applicability of the method we measure and compare radial displacement (Dr) and strain (Sr) in a total number of 56 normokinetic segments and 26 hypokinetic segments. These measurements correlate well with previous functional knowledge of the myocardial function from tagged MR data.