Pamela K. Woodard1, Matthew R. Lyons2, Sven Zuehlsdorff3, Gary McNeal4, Agus Priatna4, Cylen Javidan-Nejad1, Ibrahim M. Saeed5, Hui Xue6, Christopher Glielmi4
1Mallinckrodt Institute of Radiology, Washington University School of Medicine, St. Louis, MO, United States; 2Cardiology, Case Western School of Medicine, Cleveland, OH, United States; 3Siemens Medical Solutions, Erlangen, Germany; 4Siemens Medical Systems, Malvern, PA, United States; 5Cardiology, Saint Lukes Hospital, Kansas City, MO, United States; 6Siemens Corporate Research, Princeton, NJ, United States
A framework for non-rigid multimodal registration has been created and applied to compensate for distortions between EPI images and anatomical MRI volumes. Initially applied in brain MR imaging, this technique has now been applied to a cardiac perfusion sequence to be used with pharmacologic stress imaging. The implemented algorithm uses a key frame of the dynamic data set during the first pass of contrast agent as the reference frame. Subsequently, all other frames are registered using a nonrigid registration algorithm. Myocardial perfusion imaging was performed in patients with image reconstruction without and with motion correction. More perfusion defects were visible with motion correction than without.