A Novel Hierarchical Template Matching Model for Cardiac Motion Estimation

Cardiovascular disease diagnosis and prognosis can be improved by measuring patient-specific in-vivo local myocardial strain using Magnetic Resonance Imaging. Local myocardial strain can be determined by tracking the movement of sample muscles points during cardiac cycle using cardiac motion estimation model. The tracking accuracy of the benchmark Free Form Deformation (FFD) model is greatly affected due to its dependency on tunable parameters and regularisation function. Therefore, Hierarchical Template Matching (HTM) model, which is independent of tunable parameters, regularisation function, and image-specific features, is proposed in this article. HTM has dense and uniform points correspondence that provides HTM with the ability to estimate local muscular deformation with a promising accuracy of less than half a millimetre of cardiac wall muscle. As a result, the muscles tracking accuracy has been significantly (p < 0.001) improved (30%) compared to the benchmark model. Such merits of HTM provide reliably calculated clinical measures which can be incorporated into the decision-making process of cardiac disease diagnosis and prognosis.