Data Assimilation for Full 4D PC-MRI Measurements: Physics-Based Denoising and Interpolation

Phase-Contrast Magnetic Resonance Imaging (PC-MRI) surpasses all other imaging methods in quality and completeness for measuring time-varying volumetric blood flows and has shown potential to improve both diagnosis and risk assessment of cardiovascular diseases. However, like any measurement of physical phenomena, the data are prone to noise, artefacts and has a limited resolution. Therefore, PC-MRI data itself do not fulfil physics fluid laws making it difficult to distinguish important flow features. For data analysis, physically plausible and high-resolution data are required. Computational fluid dynamics provides high-resolution physically plausible flows. However, the flow is inherently coupled to the underlying anatomy and boundary conditions, which are difficult or sometimes even impossible to adequately model with current techniques. We present a novel methodology using data assimilation techniques for PC-MRI noise and artefact removal, generating physically plausible flow close to the measured data. It also allows us to increase the spatial and temporal resolution. To avoid sensitivity to the anatomical model, we consider and update the full 3D velocity field. We demonstrate our approach using phantom data with various amounts of induced noise and show that we can improve the data while preserving important flow features, without the need of a highly detailed model of the anatomy.