An Image Registration Approach Fusing Prior Anatomical Images and Magnetic Resonance Metabolic Imaging

Abstract

Caradiovascular diseases are the main cause of death worldwide, therefore studying the cardiac metabolic pathways is essential for assessing cardiac health. One method for imaging cardiac metabolism is magnetic resonance spectroscopy (MRS). In this paper, MRS is used to image low resolutuion pyruvate, lactate and bicarbonate metabolites, as well as high resolution anatomical (proton) images. Often, a misalignment between the two image types occurs due to motion during the acquisition process. To this end we employ a non-rigid intensity based image registration method to ensure that previously defined anatomical compartments from the proton images overlap with the corresponding ones in the metabolic images. Simulation results are shown to improve reconstruction by a factor of up 6 fold. Promising results are also obtained on an in-vivo rat study. © 2020 IEEE.