Respiratory Motion and Correction Simulation Platform for Coronary MR Angiography

This paper describes a simulation platform for use in the quantitative assessment of different respiratory motion correction techniques in Coronary MR angiography (CMRA). The simulator incorporates acquisition of motion parameters from heart motion tracking and applies it to a deformable heart model. To simulate respiratory motion, a highresolution 3-D coronary heart reference image is deformed using the estimated linear transformation from a series of volunteer coronal scout scans. The deformed and motion-affected 3-D coronary images are used to generate segmented k-space data to represent MR data acquisition affected by respiratory motion. The acquired k-space data are then corrected using different respiratory motion correction methods and converted back to image data. The resulting images are quantitatively compared with each other using image-quality measures. Simulation experiment results are validated by acquiring CMRA scans using the correction methods used in the simulation. key words: respiratory motion, MRI simulation, simulation platform, coronary MR angiography