Myocardial motion estimation in gated-MRI using optical flow refined with scale-space

Although MR imaging techniques are able to show cardiac motion qualitatively, no information is provided about motion of the tissue within the epicardial and endocardial boundaries using standard procedures. This work describes a method to quantify the myocardial motion from 3D MR images based on Optical Flow technique. To improve derivatives estimation, a fundamental step in any Optical Flow implementation, the authors applied the one parameter Gaussian derivative operator, obtained from the scale-space approach. The method quantifies the 3D LV motion by a series of 3D velocity vector fields and this vectorial information is used to estimate the scalar parameter. Myocardial kinetic energy. The evolution of the kinetic energy parameter during the cardiac cycle may represent the cardiac conditions.