Nonrigid Motion Compensation of Free Breathing Acquired Myocardial Perfusion Data

Abstract. In this work, we present a novel method to compensate the movement in images acquired during free breathing using first-pass ga-dolinium enhanced, myocardial perfusion magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). First, we use independent component analysis (ICA) to iden-tify the optimal number of independent components (ICs) that separate the breathing motion from the intensity change induced by the contrast agent. Then, synthetic images are created by recombining the ICs, but other then in previously published work (Milles et al. 2008), we omit the component related to motion, and therefore, the resulting reference image series is free of motion. Motion compensation is then achieved by using a multi-pass non-rigid image registration scheme. We tested our method on 15 distinct image series (5 patients) consisting of 58 im-ages each and we validated our method by comparing manually tracked intensity profiles of the myocardial sections to automatically generated ones before and after registration. The average correlation to the man-ually obtained curves before registration 0:89 0:11 was increased to 0:98 0:02.