Reconstruction Exploiting Phase-Correlation Motion Estimation and Motion Compensation Methods for Cine Cardiac Imaging

Introduction Motion estimation (ME) and motion compensation (MC) are both essential to video compression [1], which have also been successfully applied to dynamic MRI with reduced k-space acquisition as baseline estimation adjunct for enhancing image reconstruction. [2] However, ME and MC have not been exploited as a standalone approach for direct dynamic MRI reconstruction. The current main challenges come from the absence of full-resolution frames. To address this issue, this work proposes a reconstruction technique based solely on the phase-correlation ME method [3] to estimate the motion vectors (MVs) needed for reconstruction, without incorporating extra computational routines as in previous works. [2,4] The experimental results show that the proposed method successfully reconstructs full-resolution dynamic frames at substantially reduced acquisition time without incurring aliasing artifacts and loss of object motion information. The performance is competitive even with acquisition of only the central k-space for most of the frames.