3D displacement field reconstruction from planar tagged cardiac MR images

A major problem in cardiac imaging is the measurement of cardiac motion for identification of ischemic and infarcted tissues. W.G. O'Dell et al. (J. Magn. Reson. Imag., vol.3(p), p.208, 1993) have recently proposed a method that uses magnetic resonance tag patterns to measure the 3D displacement field of the myocardium. The measurements are sparse, however, and interpolation is required to reconstruct a dense displacement field. Here, the authors propose a method for computing a dense displacement field on a regular 3D lattice from sparse displacement measurements. This method uses a multidimensional stochastic model for the true displacement field and the Fisher estimation framework to estimate a displacement vector at each point the lattice. Simulation results are presented that demonstrate the accuracy of the authors' technique.<<ETX>>