Myocardial Motion Estimation from Cardiac Cine-MRI with a Phase-Based Optical Flow Method

Marie Xavier¹, Alain Lalande¹, Paul Michael Walker¹, Jean-Christophe Eicher², Jean-Eric Wolf, ^1,2, Franois Brunotte¹, Louis Legrand¹

Generally, the evaluation of myocardial motion from cine-MRI sequences requires a visual evaluation of the regional contractile function and depends on the experience of the reader. To automatically detect local myocardial wall motion abnormalities from cine-MRI sequence, an optical flow technique based on phase information was used. First, the robustness of the technique with regards to Rician noise and to brightness variations was evaluated on synthetic images. Then, in the context of cardiac cine-MRI, a segmental decomposition of the myocardium allowed us to study the mean velocity along the cardiac cycle and gave similar values to those obtained by echocardiography.