Use of Bandpass Gabor Filters for Enhancing Blood-Myocardium Contrast and Filling-in tags in tagged MR Images

T. Manglik, L. Axel, V. M. Pai, D. Kim, P. Dugal, A. Montillo, Q. Zhen Radiology, NYU School of Medicine, New York, NY, United States, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA, United States, Rutgers University, New Brunswick, NJ, United States Introduction Myocardial tagging provides a quantitative technique for assessing regional myocardial wall motion. Endocardial border detection can be difficult in tagged images due to the presence of tags and low myocardium-to-blood contrast. Also, the tagged MR images pose challenges for both manual and automated segmentation techniques. Gabor filters have been used extensively in image processing techniques [1] and have been recently used for detection of myocardial tags [2]. The purpose of this study was to use 2D Gabor filters to suppress the tags in the myocardium, and enhance the blood-to-myocardium contrast. Methods The Gabor filter acts as a band-pass filter with the central spatial frequency of the filter set equal to the frequency of the tags on the image. The Gabor filter used for