Elsevier

Magnetic Resonance Imaging

Volume 46, February 2018, Pages 1-9
Magnetic Resonance Imaging

Original contribution
Joint groupwise registration and ADC estimation in the liver using a B-value weighted metric

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.mri.2017.10.002Get rights and content
Under a Creative Commons license
open access

Highlights

  • A joint registration and estimation procedure for abdominal diffusion weighted imaging is proposed.

  • The proposed groupwise registration metric aims at minimizing the residuals in the estimation.

  • The introduced weighting parameters are designed to foster robust ADC estimation.

  • Joint formulation significantly improves performance with respect to the methods run in isolation.

Abstract

Purpose

The purpose of this work is to develop a groupwise elastic multimodal registration algorithm for robust ADC estimation in the liver on multiple breath hold diffusion weighted images.

Methods

We introduce a joint formulation to simultaneously solve both the registration and the estimation problems. In order to avoid non-reliable transformations and undesirable noise amplification, we have included appropriate smoothness constraints for both problems. Our metric incorporates the ADC estimation residuals, which are inversely weighted according to the signal content in each diffusion weighted image.

Results

Results show that the joint formulation provides a statistically significant improvement in the accuracy of the ADC estimates. Reproducibility has also been measured on real data in terms of the distribution of ADC differences obtained from different b-values subsets.

Conclusions

The proposed algorithm is able to effectively deal with both the presence of motion and the geometric distortions, increasing accuracy and reproducibility in diffusion parameters estimation.

Keywords

Diffusion weighted imaging
Joint optimization
Groupwise registration
ADC estimation
Residual minimization metric

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