Motion correction of free-breathing magnetic resonance renography using model-driven registration

Introduction: Model-driven registration (MDR) is a general approach to remove patient motion in quantitative imaging. In this study, we investigate whether MDR can effectively correct the motion in free-breathing MR renography (MRR).

Materials and methods: MDR was generalised to linear tracer-kinetic models and implemented using 2D or 3D free-form deformations (FFD) with multi-resolution and gradient descent optimization. MDR was evaluated using a kidney-mimicking digital reference object (DRO) and free-breathing patient data acquired at high temporal resolution in multi-slice 2D (5 patients) and 3D acquisitions (8 patients). Registration accuracy was assessed using comparison to ground truth DRO, calculating the Hausdorff distance (HD) between ground truth masks with segmentations and visual evaluation of dynamic images, signal-time courses and parametric maps (all data).

Results: DRO data showed that the bias and precision of parameter maps after MDR are indistinguishable from motion-free data. MDR led to reduction in HD (HD_unregistered = 9.98 ± 9.76, HD_registered = 1.63 ± 0.49). Visual inspection showed that MDR effectively removed motion effects in the dynamic data, leading to a clear improvement in anatomical delineation on parametric maps and a reduction in motion-induced oscillations on signal-time courses.

Discussion: MDR provides effective motion correction of MRR in synthetic and patient data. Future work is needed to compare the performance against other more established methods.