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

Abstract

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 objectbased 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 longaxis 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.

Estimation of Healthy and Fibrotic Tissue Distributions in DE-CMR Incorporating CINE-CMR in an EM Algorithm

“…The resulting masks were our test set of myocardial masks. The SAx-C and SAx-LE volumes were spatially aligned using the framework described in [9], which also corrects breath hold misalignments. The SAx-C volume at t R was transformed to the SAx-LE space and resolution.…”

A variational method for scar segmentation with myocardial contour correction in DE-CMR images

“…In hyperenhanced regions considered as artifacts by the cardiologists, the SAx DE-CMR myocardial contours were adjusted in order to exclude them from the scar segmentation; these regions are not taken into account in the metrics, for any of the segmentation methods. The CINE and DE-CMR volumes were spatially aligned using the framework described in [8]. Summarizing, the SAx volumes are interpolated in the long axis direction in order to provide quasi-isotropic resolution.…”

Synthetic Generation of Myocardial Blood–Oxygen-Level-Dependent MRI Time Series Via Structural Sparse Decomposition Modeling

“…Further improvements in MRI techniques that increase spatial resolution and fidelity could alleviate such issues in the future. In addition, adopting techniques that could register information of area at risk with cine (BOLD) MRI [50], [51] could improve the identification of ischemic time series for training and validation purposes.…”