An image deformation technique for myocardial motion estimation

Presents a self-organizing method for estimating a transformation that can elastically map one subject's MR cardiac image to the same slice cut image acquired at different heart beat sequences. One slice image put image is elastically deformed to match the other slice image called the reference image. Both two images are linearly divided into several smaller areas of equal size. A local correspondence is used to estimate the best matching position by moving individual area of the input image to the reference image within a search neighborhood. Based on local correspondence, coarse displacement vectors for each area are determined by the position difference between the original and the new area centers. The estimated vectors provide a complete transformation that matches the entire input image to the reference image. As the process is repeated, a better transformation is obtained that improves the matching. This algorithm has been tested on simulations of 2D deformed images and been found to be successful for MR cardiac images.