Sotirios A. Tsaftaris1,2, Xiangzhi Zhou2,
Richard Tang2, Rachel Klein2, Aggelos Katsaggelos1,
Rohan Dharmakumar2
1Electrical Engineering and Computer
Science, Northwestern University, Evanston, IL, United States; 2Radiology,
Northwestern University, Chicago, IL, United States
It
is particularly important for the evaluation of cardiac phase-resolved
myocardial blood-oxygen-level-dependent (BOLD) MRI studies, to robustly and
reproducibly synchronize images from rest and stress studies. The possibility
of visualizing BOLD signal changes in multiple cardiac phases is expected to
increase the diagnostic confidence for identifying the affected myocardial
territories. The purpose of this work is to develop automated statistical
methods to facilitate in the robust and reproducible evaluation of cardiac
phase-resolved myocardial BOLD MRI through temporal synchronization of rest
and stress images acquired at different heart rates, without resorting to