A NOVEL TAG REMOVAL TECHNIQUE FOR TAGGED CARDIAC MRI AND ITS APPLICATIONS

In this paper we present a novel tag removal method for tagged cardiac MR images. This method is based on a 2D band-stop filtering technique, which selectively attenuates the tag pattern's frequency components in the spatial-frequency domain. To automatically design the band-stop filter, we developed a mean shift-based clustering method to partition the power spectrum image into several harmonic regions. Then a principal component analysis-based multivariate fitting procedure is implemented to model the harmonic peak. We have tested this tag removal method on a variety of tagged cardiac MR images with different imaging settings, which turned to be robust and computationally modest. Comparing with previous tag removal methods, the results of this new method are more consistent with the original image's appearance, and can recover more detailed structures, such as the papillary muscles. Based on the new tag-removed images, we have tested segmenting the left ventricular endocardium and papillary muscles using a conventional segmentation method, and achieved better performance than using the previous tag removal method