Breathing deformation model -- application to multi-resolution abdominal MRI
This work addresses the challenge of obtaining high-resolution dynamic MRI for abdominal imaging, which is incremental as it applies existing registration methods to a specific medical imaging problem.
The authors tackled the problem of low resolution in dynamic MRI by applying a deformation model from low-resolution images to generate high-resolution dynamic MRI of abdominal breathing phases, achieving results that showed the model could be computed from very low-resolution images.
Dynamic MRI is a technique of acquiring a series of images continuously to follow the physiological changes over time. However, such fast imaging results in low resolution images. In this work, abdominal deformation model computed from dynamic low resolution images have been applied to high resolution image, acquired previously, to generate dynamic high resolution MRI. Dynamic low resolution images were simulated into different breathing phases (inhale and exhale). Then, the image registration between breathing time points was performed using the B-spline SyN deformable model and using cross-correlation as a similarity metric. The deformation model between different breathing phases were estimated from highly undersampled data. This deformation model was then applied to the high resolution images to obtain high resolution images of different breathing phases. The results indicated that the deformation model could be computed from relatively very low resolution images.