3D non-rigid motion correction of free-breathing abdominal DCE-MRI data

Inflammatory bowel diseases (IBD) constitute one of the largest healthcare problems in the Western World. Grading of the disease severity is important to determine treatment strategy and to quantify the response to treatment. The Time Injection Curves (TICs) after injecting a contrast agent contain important information on the degree of inflammation of the bowel wall. However, respiratory and peristaltic motions complicate an easy analysis of such curves since spatial correspondence over time is lost. We propose a gated, 3D non-rigid motion correction method that robustly extracts time intensity curves from bowel segments in free-breathing abdominal DCE-MRI data. It is shown that the mean TICs in small bowel segments could be robustly computed and contained less fluctuations than prior to the registration.