Manifold learning for image-based breathing gating in ultrasound and MRI

Respiratory motion is a challenging factor for image acquisition and image-guided procedures in the abdominal and thoracic region. In order to address the issues arising from respiratory motion, it is often necessary to detect the respiratory signal. In this article, we propose a novel, purely image-based retrospective respiratory gating method for ultrasound and MRI. Further, we apply this technique to acquire breathing-affected 4D ultrasound with a wobbler probe and, similarly, to create 4D MR with a slice stacking approach. We achieve the gating with Laplacian eigenmaps, a manifold learning technique, to determine the low-dimensional manifold embedded in the high-dimensional image space. Since Laplacian eigenmaps assign to each image frame a coordinate in low-dimensional space by respecting the neighborhood relationship, they are well suited for analyzing the breathing cycle. We perform the image-based gating on several 2D and 3D ultrasound datasets over time, and quantify its very good performance by comparing it to measurements from an external gating system. For MRI, we perform the manifold learning on several datasets for various orientations and positions. We achieve very high correlations by a comparison to an alternative gating with diaphragm tracking.