Joint Estimation of Cardiac Motion and T_1^* Maps for Magnetic Resonance Late Gadolinium Enhancement Imaging

In the diagnosis of myocardial infarction, magnetic resonance imaging can provide information about myocardial contractility and tissue characterization, including viability. In current clinical practice, separate scans are required for each aspect. A recently proposed method showed how the same information can be extracted from a single, short scan of 4 s, but made strong assumptions about the underlying cardiac motion. We propose a fixed-point iteration scheme that retains the benefits of their approach while lifting its limitations, making it robust to cardiac arrhythmia. We compare our method to the state of the art using phantom data as well as data from 11 patients and show a consistent improvement of all evaluation criteria, e. g. the end-diastolic Dice coefficient of an arrythmic case improves from 86 % (state-of-the-art method) to 94 % (proposed method).