Accurate harmonic phase tracking of tagged MRI using locally-uniform myocardium displacement constraint

Harmonic phase (HARP) tracking is one of the most commonly used techniques for estimating the myocardium regional function from tagged cardiac Magnetic Resonance Imaging sequences. Nevertheless, tag fading and phase distortion can severely limit the tracking accuracy of the technique. In this work, we propose to modify the HARP tracking algorithm to impose a constraint of locally uniform displacement field while tracking the different myocardium points. A numerical contracting phantom and a dataset of 11 patients are used to study the performance of the proposed technique at the different cardiac phases, slices, and regions. The results show that the proposed method improves the tracking accuracy and the reliability of the conventional HARP technique.