A Multi-scale Feature Based Optic Flow Method for 3D Cardiac Motion Estimation

Abstract. The dynamic behavior of the cardiac muscle is strongly dependent on heart diseases. Optic flow techniques are essential tools to assess and quantify the contraction of the cardiac walls. Most of the current methods however are restricted to the analysis of 2D MR-tagging image sequences: due to the complex twisting motion combined with longitudinal shortening, a 2D approach will always suffer from throughplane motion. In this paper we investigate a new 3D aperture-problem free optic flow method to study the cardiac motion by tracking stable multi-scale features such as maxima and minima on 3D tagged MR and sine-phase image volumes. We applied harmonic filtering in the Fourier domain to measure the phase. This removes the dependency of intensity changes of the tagging pattern over time due to T1 relaxation. The regular geometry, the size-changing patterns of the MR-tags stretching and compressing along with the tissue, and the phase- and sine-phase plots represent a suitabl...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2009
• Where: SCALESPACE
• Authors: Alessandro Becciu, Hans C. van Assen, Luc Florack, Sebastian Kozerke, Vivian Roode, Bart M. ter Haar Romeny
• Keywords: Cardiac, Computer Vision, Optic flow, Optic flow Method, SCALESPACE 2009