Automatic perfusion analysis using phase-based registration and object-based image analysis

MRI perfusion imaging enables the non-invasive assessment of myocardial blood supply. The purpose of the presented work is to enable a quantitative assessment of the image sequences for clinical application. To this end an automatic preprocessing including ROI detection and outlier removal has been combined with a phase-based registration approach and an object-based myocardium segmentation. The suggested processing pipeline has been tested with 21 image sequences provided by the STACOM motion correction challenge. The corrected image sequences have been assessed by comparison with gamma variate curves fitted to the voxels intensity curves. The automatic segmentation could be compared with expert segmentations provided by the challenge organizers. The results indicate an improvement through the motion correction and a good agreement with the reference segmentation in most cases.