Knowledge-Based Anisotropic Diffusion of Vector-Valued 4-Dimensional Cardiac MR Images
Gerardo I. Sanchez-Ortiz, Daniel Rueckert, Peter Burger · 1996
We present a general formulation for a new knowledge-based approach to anisotropic diffusion of multi-feature and multi-dimensional images, with an illustrative application to cardiac MRI. We incorporate all available information through a more complete definition of the conductance function which differs from previous approaches in two aspects. First, we model the conductance as an explicit function of the position and not only of the differential geometry of the image data. Inherent properties of the system (such as geometrical features or non-homogeneous data sampling) can therefore be taken into account by allowing the conductance values to depend on the location in the spatial and temporal coordinate space. Secondly, by defining the conductance as a second rank tensor, the non-homogeneous diffusion equation gains a truly anisotropic character which is essential to emulate and handle certain aspects of complex data systems. We demonstrate the efficiency of the proposed framework ...