In vivo cardiac microstructure acquired using cardiac diffusion tensor imaging (cDTI) is a critical component of patient-specific models of cardiac electrophysiology and mechanics. In order to limit bulk motion artifacts and acquisition time, cDTI microstructural data is acquired at a single cardiac phase necessitating registration to the reference configuration on which the patient-specific computational models are based. Herein, we propose a method to register subject-specific microstructural data to an arbitrary cardiac phase using measured cardiac displacements. We validate our approach using a subject-specific computational phantom based on data from human subjects. Compared to a geometry-based non-rigid registration method, the displacement-based registration leads to improved accuracy (less than 1° versus 10° average median error in cardiomyocyte angular differences) and tighter confidence interval (3° versus 65° average upper limit of the 95% confidence interval).
Keywords: Cardiac Diffusion Tensor Imaging; Computational Cardiac Phantom; Displacement MRI; Non-rigid Registration.