Cardiac Motion Estimation Using Covariant Derivatives and Helmholtz Decomposition

Quantification of cardiac function is important for the assessment of abnormalities and response to therapy. We present a method to reconstruct dense cardiac motion from sparse features in tagging MRI, decomposed into solenoidal and irrotational parts using multi-scale Helmholtz decomposition. Reconstruction is based on energy minimization using covariant derivatives exploiting prior knowledge about the motion field. The method is tested on cardiac motion images. Experiments on phantom data show that both covariant derivatives and multi-scale Helmholtz decomposition improve motion field reconstruction.