Department of Radiology - Medical Physics

DCE-MRI Registration of Abdominal Tumor Data Based on Deconvolution of Joint Statistics

The analysis of Dynamic Contrast Enhanced Magnetic Resonance Imaging (DCE-MRI) data of abdominal tumors is a challenging task. The accumulation of contrast agent in tissues results in a temporally varying contrast in the image series. At the same time, the abdomen is subject to complex and potentially extensive motion due to breathing, heart beat, and peristalsis. This complicates any further automated analysis of the DCE-MRI time series such as tumor lesion segmentation and volumetry. To address this problem we propose a novel non-rigid registration method based on the deconvolution of the joint statistics of pairs of images in the time series. The registration method has been tested with both simulated phantoms as well as real datasets with encouraging results for both its accuracy and efficiency.