Hybrid intensity- and phase-based optical flow tracking of tagged MRI

Accurate tracking of the myocardium tissues in tagged Magnetic Resonance Images (MRI) is essential for evaluating the cardiac function. Current tracking methods utilize either the image intensity or the image phase as landmarks that can be tracked. In either case, the performance is vulnerable to the image quality and the fading of the tag lines. In this work, we propose a hybrid optical flow tracking method that combines both the intensity and the phase features of the image. The method is validated using numerical cardiac phantom as well as real MRI data experiments. Both experiments showed that the proposed method outperforms current intensity-based optical flow tracking and the phase-based HARP method with maximum error of 1 pixel at extreme conditions of tag fading.