DENSE-Guided Deep Motion Networks Accounted by Large Rotations to Improve Myocardial Strain Analysis from Routine Cine MRI

Myocardial strain imaging provides a valuable tool for detecting subclinical left ventricular (LV) dysfunction and adding prognostic value in assessing various types of heart disease. Recent studies have utilized highly accurate strain-dedicated techniques, such as displacement encoding with stimulated echoes (DENSE), to train a deep learning (DL) framework to predict the myocardial displacements/deformations from routine cine balanced steady state free precession (bSSFP) images. However, these methods have shown limited performance in capturing the large rotational motion of the myocardium associated with twist and torsion over time, which are important aspects of myocardial mechanics. To address this gap, this paper introduces a novel DENSE-guided DL network that explicitly accounts for large rotational motion to further improve strain analysis of standard cine bSSFP images. Specifically, our proposed network includes two key components: (i) a time-series rotation estimation network employing a 3D convolutional encoder-decoder architecture to model the large rotational dynamics of the LV myocardium over time, and (ii) a radial motion prediction network based on deformable image registration. The output of these two sub-networks was integrated and refined through a fusion network to predict the final myocardial displacements, supervised by DENSE ground truth. Experimental results show that our method improves the accuracy of myocardial strain with effectively captured large rotations.