Restoration of Phase-Contrast Cardiovascular MRI for the Construction of Cardiac Contractility Atlases

Cardiac Atlases are promising tools for the interpretation of functional and anatomical structures of the heart. Myocardial viability is reflected by both global and regional contractile abnormalities. Atlases incorporating contractility information of a population can assist the diagnosis of myocardial disease and myocardial infarction. For the analysis of myocardial contractility phase-contrast MRI (PC-MRI) is emerging as a valuable clinical tool. The myocardial velocity distribution depicted by PC-MRI provides important insights into the intrinsic mechanics of the heart. As with many imaging techniques, there is an inherent trade-off between imaging resolution and noise. The main purpose of this study is to reduce the noise exhibited in phase-contrast MRI by applying a total variation restoration algorithm. The restoration algorithm has been evaluated on a spiral phase-contrast MRI sequence from a group of normal subjects. The results have shown that the proposed method is able to restore the myocardial velocity distribution whilst preserving the fidelity of the underlying contractile behavior.