Automatic ROI Specification and Reference Frame Selection for Motion Correction in Cardiac Imaging

Jieying Luo¹, R. Reeve Ingle¹, Dwight G. Nishimura¹

An automatic method for ROI specification and reference frame selection has been developed to enable automatic motion estimation from two-dimensional image navigators. Filtering and feature region searching techniques are used to automatically detect an ROI covering the heart. A novel principal component analysis technique is used to extract respiratory information from the image navigators. This respiratory information is used to identify an image at end expiration to use as a reference for subsequent motion estimation. This method is applied to a free-breathing coronary MR angiography acquisition to enable automatic display of motion-corrected images after a scan.