Abstract
In this paper, we present a novel method for the correction of motion artifacts that are present in fetal magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scans of the whole uterus. Contrary to current slice-to-volume registration (SVR) methods, requiring an inflexible anatomical enclosure of a single investigated organ, the proposed patch-to-volume reconstruction (PVR) approach is able to reconstruct a large field of view of non-rigidly deforming structures. It relaxes rigid motion assumptions by introducing a specific amount of redundant information that is exploited with parallelized patchwise optimization, super-resolution, and automatic outlier rejection. We further describe and provide an efficient parallel implementation of PVR allowing its execution within reasonable time on commercially available graphics processing units, enabling its use in the clinical practice. We evaluate PVR’s computational overhead compared with standard methods and observe improved reconstruction accuracy in the presence of affine motion artifacts compared with conventional SVR in synthetic experiments. Furthermore, we have evaluated our method qualitatively and quantitatively on real fetal MRI data subject to maternal breathing and sudden fetal movements. We evaluate peak-signal-to-noise ratio, structural similarity index, and cross correlation with respect to the originally acquired data and provide a method for visual inspection of reconstruction uncertainty. We further evaluate the distance error for selected anatomical landmarks in the fetal head, as well as calculating the mean and maximum displacements resulting from automatic non-rigid registration to a motion-free ground truth image. These experiments demonstrate a successful application of PVR motion compensation to the whole fetal body, uterus, and placenta.
Highlights
T HE advent of single shot fast spin echo T2weighted sequences has enabled spin echo image formation principles [1] in magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) to play an essential role in fetal diagnosis [2] and research [3]
In this paper we present a novel method for the correction of motion artifacts that are present in fetal Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) scans of the whole uterus
We further describe and provide an efficient parallel implementation of patch-to-volume reconstruction (PVR) allowing its execution within reasonable time on commercially available graphics processing units (GPU), enabling its use in the clinical practice
Summary
T HE advent of single shot fast spin echo (ssFSE) T2weighted sequences has enabled spin echo image formation principles [1] in magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) to play an essential role in fetal diagnosis [2] and research [3]. Cases for which ultrasound (US) fails to acquire conclusive image data benefit from fetal MRI [4], [5]. Recent advances in motion compensation for fetal MRI [6] facilitate advanced image-based diagnostics and lead to novel insights about the human development. Fetal MRI enables an ability to distinguish between individual fetal structures such as brain, lung, kidney and liver, as well as pregnancy structures such as the placenta, umbilical cord. Kainz are with Biomedical Image Analysis Group, Department of Computing, Imperial College London, UK
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