Comparative Visualizations of Noisy and Filtered Blood Flow from 4 D PC-MRI Cardiac Datasets

Modern phase-contrast magnetic resonance imaging (PC-MRI) can acquire both cardiac anatomy and flow function in a single acquisition and deliver high quality volumetric and time-varying (4D) datasets which enable better diagnosis and risk assessment of various cardiovascular diseases. A good way to visualize blood flow from 4D PC-MRI datasets is to use animated pathlines through the anatomical context for representing the trajectories of the blood particles. Artifact correction is one crucial step in the processing pipeline of 4D PC-MRI datasets for representing the cardiac flow using pathlines, which in turn can reduce the overall quality of the useful information in the dataset. In this work, an approach is presented for comparative visualization of 4D PC-MRI datasets before and after artifact correction for qualitative analysis.