LaMoD: Latent Motion Diffusion Model For Myocardial Strain Generation

TL;DR

LaMoD introduces a novel diffusion-based model that predicts highly accurate myocardial motion from standard CMR videos, enhancing clinical cardiac analysis without additional imaging.

Contribution

The paper presents a new latent diffusion approach that leverages pre-trained registration features to improve motion prediction accuracy in cardiac MRI.

Findings

Significantly improves motion prediction accuracy over existing methods.

Enables accurate myocardial strain analysis from standard CMR videos.

Outperforms prior techniques in clinical motion estimation tasks.

Abstract

Motion and deformation analysis of cardiac magnetic resonance (CMR) imaging videos is crucial for assessing myocardial strain of patients with abnormal heart functions. Recent advances in deep learning-based image registration algorithms have shown promising results in predicting motion fields from routinely acquired CMR sequences. However, their accuracy often diminishes in regions with subtle appearance changes, with errors propagating over time. Advanced imaging techniques, such as displacement encoding with stimulated echoes (DENSE) CMR, offer highly accurate and reproducible motion data but require additional image acquisition, which poses challenges in busy clinical flows. In this paper, we introduce a novel Latent Motion Diffusion model (LaMoD) to predict highly accurate DENSE motions from standard CMR videos. More specifically, our method first employs an encoder from a pre-trained registration network that learns latent motion features (also considered as deformation-based shape features) from image sequences. Supervised by the ground-truth motion provided by DENSE, LaMoD then leverages a probabilistic latent diffusion model to reconstruct accurate motion from these extracted features. Experimental results demonstrate that our proposed method, LaMoD, significantly improves the accuracy of motion analysis in standard CMR images; hence improving myocardial strain analysis in clinical settings for cardiac patients. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/jr-xing/LaMoD.