Quantitative T1 mapping by MRI is an increasingly important tool for clinical assessment of cardiovascular diseases. The cardiac T1 map is derived by fitting a known signal model to a series of baseline images, while the quality of this map can be deteriorated by involuntary respiratory and cardiac motion. To correct motion, a template image is often needed to register all baseline images, but the choice of template is nontrivial, leading to inconsistent performance sensitive to image contrast. In this work, we propose a novel deep-learning-based groupwise registration framework, which omits the need for a template, and registers all baseline images simultaneously. We design two groupwise losses for this registration framework: the first is a linear principal component analysis (PCA) loss that enforces alignment of baseline images irrespective of the intensity variation, and the second is an auxiliary relaxometry loss that enforces adherence of intensity profile to the signal model. We extensively evaluated our method, termed “PCA-Relax”, and other baseline methods on an in-house cardiac MRI dataset including both pre- and post-contrast T1 sequences. All methods were evaluated under three distinct training-and-evaluation strategies, namely, standard, one-shot, and test-time-adaptation. The proposed PCA-Relax showed further improved performance of registration and mapping over well-established baselines. The proposed groupwise framework is generic and can be adapted to applications involving multiple images.@en

Quantitative MRI (qMRI) of the heart has become an important clinical tool for examining myocardial tissue properties. Because heart is a moving object, it is usually imaged with electrocardiogram and respiratory gating during acquisition, to “freeze” its motion. In reality, gating is more-often-than-not imperfect given the heart rate variability and nonideal breath-hold. qMRI of the heart, consequently, is characteristic of varying image contrast as well as residual motion, the latter compromising the quality of quantitative mapping. Motion correction is an important step prior to parametric mapping, however, a long-standing difficulty for registering the dynamic sequence is that the contrast across frames varies wildly: depending on the acquisition scheme some frames can have extremely poor contrast, which fails both traditional optimization-based and modern learning-based registration methods. In this work, we propose a novel framework named DisQ, which Disentangles Quantitative mapping sequences into the latent space of contrast and anatomy, fully unsupervised. The disentangled latent spaces serve for the purpose of generating a series of images with identical contrast, which enables easy and accurate registration of all frames. We applied our DisQ method to the modified Look-Locker inversion recovery (MOLLI) sequence, and demonstrated improved performance of T₁ mapping. In addition, we showed the possibility of generating a dynamic series of baseline images with exactly the same shape, strictly registered and perfectly “frozen". Our proposed DisQ methodology readily extends to other types of cardiac qMRI such as T₂ mapping and perfusion.

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