Experience with 3D optical flow on gated MRI cardiac datasets

We report on the computation of 3D volumetric optical flow on gated MRI datasets. We extend the 2D least squares and regularization approaches of Lucas and Kanade [4] and Horn and Schunck [3] and show flow fields (as XY and XZ 2D flows) for a beating heart. The flow not only can capture the expansion and contraction of various parts of the heart motion but also can capture the twisting motion of the heart.