Extracting tissue deformation using Gabor filter banks

This paper presents a new approach for accurate extraction of tissue deformation imaged with tagged MR. Our method, based on banks of Gabor filters, adjusts (1) the aspect and (2) orientation of the filter’s envelope and adjusts (3) the radial frequency and (4) angle of the filter’s sinusoidal grating to extract information about the deformation of tissue. The method accurately extracts tag line spacing, orientation, displacement and effective contrast. Existing, non-adaptive methods often fail to recover useful displacement information in the proximity of tissue boundaries while our method works in the proximity of the boundaries. We also present an interpolation method to recover all tag information at a finer resolution than the filter bank parameters. Results are shown on simulated images of translating and contracting tissue.