The use of hybrid models to recover cardiac wall motion in tagged MR images

We present a new algorithm for the automatic recovery of tag grid-line intersections in Tagged MR images of the left ventricle of the heart. Our method uses an active spring mesh to capture local properties of the motion and a global motion model to capture the global coherence of the motion. We recover the global component of the motion using robust estimation. Different motion models have been developed for short and long axis views of the heart. The algorithm has been tested on healthy and pathological data