Motion analysis with quadrature filter based registration of tagged MRI sequences

Analysis of tagged MRI is a valuable tool for assessing regional myocardial function. One major obstacle for existing methods based on feature extraction and registration is the desaturation of the tagging grid over time. We propose a method based on quadrature filters that is invariant to changes in intensity, robust with respect to the grid geometry and provides a dense motion field that allows for the analysis of both global and local movements. A multi-scale and multi-resolution scheme is used to cover different scales of motion and to speed up registration. The described method has been integrated into a prototypical application and applied to a phantom data set and 15 volunteer data sets provided by the STACOM'11. The automatic detection of the 4D motion field took about 130 minutes per MRI data set and about 90 minutes per US data set and resulted in plausible motion fields, which will be quantitatively assessed within the motion tracking challenge at MICCAI 2011.