Coregistration and Visualization of Regionally Perfused Myocardium from First-Pass Multislice Sets Based on Independent Components Analysis

¹Computer Science, University of Houston, Houston, TX, USA; ²Radiology, Leiden University Medical Center, Leiden, Netherlands

The aim of this work is to implement an approach for the visualization of regional myocardial perfusion from first pass sets. The method uses Independent Component Analysis to automatically correct for breathing motion among the different time frames of the same slice, thereby allowing the generation of perfusion maps and their reconstruction in a 3D volume. This approach was tested on dynamic cardiac MR images collected during intracoronary infusion of Gd-based contrast agent on pigs. The ICA efficiently co-registered the different frames allowing the generation of 3D regional perfusion map.