Active contours: an overview with applications to motion artifact cancellation in MRI

Motion can be estimated by detecting the edges of a moving object using active contours, and registering them together to obtain the motion model parameters. This idea can be applied to patient motion during the acquisition of an MRI to eliminate motion artifacts in the image. The data obtained during the MRI acquisition, the k-space, can be divided into several subbands such that each subband is acquired in a small fraction of the full imaging time. These subbands create invariant tissue feature maps called subband images. Using active contours, the relative motion is analyzed across the different subband images to determine the motion parameters. Using these motion parameters it is possible to correct the subbands, thus correcting the k-space. This has the potential to yield clear, noise-free MR images