MRI-Based Quantification of Myocardial Perfusion at Rest and Stress Using Automated Frame-by-Frame Segmentation and Non-Rigid Registration

We developed a method for automated quantification of myocardial perfusion from cardiac magnetic resonance (CMR) images. Our approach uses regionbased and edge-based level set techniques for endocardial and epicardial border detection combined with non-rigid registration achieved by a 2D multi-scale cross-correlation and contour adaptation. This method was tested on 66 short-axis image sequences (Philips1.5T) obtained in 11 patients at rest and during vasodilator stress at 3 levels of the left ventricle during first pass of a Gadolinium-DTPA bolus. Myocardial ROIs were automatically defined and contrast enhancement curves were constructed throughout the image sequence. Analysis of one sequence required