Factors Affecting Optical Flow Performance in Tagging Magnetic Resonance Imaging

Changes in cardiac deformation patterns are correlated with cardiac pathologies. Deformation can be extracted from tagging Magnetic Resonance Imaging (tMRI) using Optical Flow (OF) techniques. For applications of OF in a clinical setting it is important to assess to what extent the performance of a particular OF method is stable across different clinical acquisition artifacts. This paper presents a statistical validation framework, based on ANOVA, to assess the motion and appearance factors that have the largest influence on OF accuracy drop. In order to validate this framework, we created a database of simulated tMRI data including the most common artifacts of MRI and test three different OF methods, including HARP.