Unlocking 2D/3D+T myocardial mechanics from cine MRI: a mechanically regularized space-time finite element...

Area of Science:

• Biomedical Engineering
• Medical Imaging Analysis
• Computational Mechanics

Background:

• Accurate quantification of cardiac motion and strain from cine MRI is crucial for assessing myocardial mechanics but remains challenging.
• Existing methods like feature tracking and deep learning often lack biomechanical interpretability and temporal consistency.
• Routine cine MRI data is widely available, offering potential for advanced cardiac function assessment.

Purpose of the Study:

• To develop and validate a novel spacetime-regularized finite-element digital image/volume correlation (FE-DIC/DVC) framework for 2D/3D+T myocardial motion and strain analysis.
• To improve biomechanical consistency and temporal coherence in cardiac motion quantification using standard cine MRI.
• To enable more accurate and interpretable assessment of 4D cardiac function.

Main Methods:

• Proposed a spacetime-regularized FE-DIC/DVC framework integrating Multiview alignment and 2D/3D+T motion estimation.
• Employed region-specific biomechanical regularization and data-driven temporal decomposition for spatial fidelity and temporal consistency.
• Utilized a correlation-based Multiview alignment module to enhance anatomical consistency across different MRI views.

Main Results:

• The FE-DIC/DVC framework achieved superior accuracy and temporal consistency in 2D+T motion and strain estimation compared to classical and deep learning methods on synthetic data.
• Demonstrated significant improvements in landmark error and boundary-tracking Dice scores on public and clinical datasets.
• Consistently ranked among the top two methods for overall registration quality across various datasets.

Conclusions:

• The proposed FE-DIC/DVC framework enables accurate 2D/3D+T myocardial mechanics quantification using only routine cine MRI.
• This approach offers enhanced biomechanical interpretability and temporal coherence, addressing limitations of current methods.
• Provides a practical and effective pathway toward comprehensive 4D cardiac function assessment.