Rank Constrained Diffeomorphic Density Motion Estimation for Respiratory Correlated Computed Tomography

Motion estimation of organs in a sequence of images is important in numerous medical imaging applications. The focus of this paper is the analysis of 4D Respiratory Correlated Computed Tomography (RCCT) Imaging. It is hypothesized that the quasi-periodic breathing induced motion of organs in the thorax can be represented by deformations spanning a very low dimension subspace of the full infinite dimensional space of diffeomorphic transformations. This paper presents a novel motion estimation algorithm that includes the constraint for low-rank motion between the different phases of the RCCT images. Low-rank deformation solutions are necessary for the efficient statistical analysis and improved treatment planning and delivery. Although the application focus of this paper is RCCT the algorithm is quite general and applicable to various motion estimation problems in medical imaging.