Robust motion correction for cardiac T1 and ECV mapping using a T1 relaxation model approach

T1 and ECV mapping are quantitative methods for myocardial tissue characterization using cardiac MRI, and are highly relevant for the diagnosis of diffuse myocardial diseases. Since the maps are calculated pixel-by-pixel from a set of MRI images with different T1-weighting, it is critical to assure exact spatial correspondence between these images. However, in practice, different sources of motion e.g. cardiac motion, respiratory motion or patient motion, hamper accurate T1 and ECV calculation such that retrospective motion correction is required. We propose a new robust non-rigid registration framework combining a data-driven initialization with a model-based registration approach, which uses a model for T1 relaxation to avoid direct registration of images with highly varying contrast. The registration between native T1 and enhanced T1 to obtain a motion free ECV map is also calculated using information from T1 model fitting. The method was validated on three datasets recorded with two substantially different acquisition protocols (MOLLI (dataset 1 (n=15) and dataset 2 (n=29)) and STONE (dataset 3 (n = 210))), one in breath-hold condition and one free-breathing. The average Dice coefficient increased from 72.6 +/- 12.1% to 82.3 +/- 7.4% (P < 0.05) and mean boundary error decreased from 2.91 +/- 1.51mm to 1.62 +/- 0.80mm (P < 0.05) for motion correction in a single T1-weighted image sequence (3 datasets) while average Dice coefficient increased from 63.4 +/- 22.5% to 79.2 +/- 8.5% (P < 0.05) and mean boundary error decreased from 3.26 +/- 2.64mm to 1.77 +/- 0.86mm (P < 0.05) between native and enhanced sequences (dataset 1 and 2). Overall, the native T1 SD error decreased from 67.32 +/- 32.57ms to 58.11 +/- 21.59ms (P < 0.05), enhanced SD error from 30.15 +/- 25ms to 22.74 +/- 8.94ms (P < 0.05) and ECV SD error from 10.08 +/- 9.59% to 5.42 +/- 3.21% (P <0.05) (dataset 1 and 2). (C) 2018 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.