2020/08/17 by Pingjun Chen, Xiao Chen, Chen, Pingjun +9
Medicine · #Advanced MRI Techniques and Applications #Cardiac Imaging and Diagnostics #Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (cs.CV) #FOS: Computer and information sciences #FOS: Electrical engineering #Image and Video Processing (eess.IV) #Medical Imaging Techniques and Applications #electronic engineering #information engineering
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2008.07579
openalex publication_date 2020/08/17 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
Cardiac motion estimation is critical to the assessment of cardiac function. Myocardium feature tracking (FT) can directly estimate cardiac motion from cine MRI, which requires no special scanning procedure. However, current deep learning-based FT methods may result in unrealistic myocardium shapes since the learning is solely guided by image intensities without considering anatomy. On the other hand, motion estimation through learning is challenging because ground-truth motion fields are almost impossible to obtain. In this study, we propose a novel Anatomy-Aware Tracker (AATracker) for cardiac motion estimation that preserves anatomy by weak supervision. A convolutional variational autoencoder (VAE) is trained to encapsulate realistic myocardium shapes. A baseline dense motion tracker is trained to approximate the motion fields and then refined to estimate anatomy-aware motion fields under the weak supervision from the VAE. We evaluate the proposed method on long-axis cardiac cine MRI, which has more complex myocardium appearances and motions than short-axis. Compared with other methods, AATracker significantly improves the tracking performance and provides visually more realistic tracking results, demonstrating the effectiveness of the proposed weakly-supervision scheme in cardiac motion estimation.