ADC-Weighted Joint Registration-Estimation for Cardiac Diffusion Magnetic Resonance Imaging

The purpose of this work is to develop a method for the groupwise registration of diffusion weighted datasets of the heart which automatically provide smooth Apparent Diffusion Coefficient (ADC) estimations, by making use of a novel multimodal scheme. To this
end, we have introduced a joint methodology that simultaneously performs both the alignment of the images and the ADC estimation. In order to promote diffeomorphic transformations and to avoid undesirable noise amplification, we have included appropriate
smoothness constraints for both problems under the same formulation. The implemented multimodal registration metric incorporates the ADC estimation residuals, which are inversely weighted with the b-values to balance the influence of the signal level for each diffusion weighted image. Results show that the joint formulation provides more robust and precise ADC estimations and a significant improvement in the overlap of the contour
of manual delineations along the different b-values. The proposed algorithm is able to effectively deal with the presence of both physiological motion and inherent contrast variability for the different b-value images, increasing accuracy and robustness of the estimation of diffusion parameters for cardiac imaging.