Elastic spline models for human cardiac motion estimation

Elastic splines (including dynamic "snakes" and elastic contours), minimising an energy norm of the membrane and/or thin-plate types, have been used to model many surfaces in visual reconstruction and related biomedical applications. The authors model the displacement of the material between successive cardiac images using vector splines. They define a family of elastic splines. These splines can be tuned to enforce different types and different degrees of smoothness. They assess how well these splines can be used to reconstruct human cardiac motion. The proposed method has been implemented based on MRI projection data.