3D displacement field reconstruction from planar tagged cardiac MR images

A major problem in cardiac imaging is the measurement of cardiac motion for identification of ischemic and infarcted tissues. W.G. O´Dell et al. (J. Magn. Reson. Imag., vol.3(p), p.208, 1993) have recently proposed a method that uses magnetic resonance tag patterns to measure the 3D displacement field of the myocardium. The measurements are sparse, however, and interpolation is required to reconstruct a dense displacement field. Here, the authors propose a method for computing a dense displacement field on a regular 3D lattice from sparse displacement measurements. This method uses a multidimensional stochastic model for the true displacement field and the Fisher estimation framework to estimate a displacement vector at each point the lattice. Simulation results are presented that demonstrate the accuracy of the authors´ technique