Seminar: Pixel Club
Model-Based Self-Supervised Motion Correction for Robust Cardiac T1 Mapping
| Cardiac T1 mapping is a crucial quantitative MRI technique for diagnosing diffuse myocardial diseases. Traditional methods rely on breath-hold sequences and ECG-based cardiac triggering, but these approaches face challenges with patient compliance, limiting their clinical effectiveness. Image registration can enable motion-robust T1 mapping, but intensity variations between time points complicate the process.
We introduce MBSS-T1, a subject-specific self-supervised model for motion correction in cardiac T1 mapping. Our method incorporates physical constraints for enforcing signal decay behavior and anatomical constraints ensuring realistic deformations along the longitudinal relaxation axis. We evaluated MBSS-T1 on a public dataset of 210 patients (STONE sequence) and a prospective dataset of 19 subjects acquired at the Technion’s May-Blum-Dahl Human MRI research center. The model outperformed baseline deep-learning registration methods in model fitting quality, anatomical alignment, and clinical assessment scores provided by expert radiologists. MBSS-T1 enables motion-robust cardiac T1 mapping for both free-breathing and breath-hold acquisitions, improving accessibility for a broader range of patients while reducing the reliance on large annotated datasets. Our work was presented and published at MICCAI 2023 and ISMRM 2024 (oral), as well as in the journal Medical Image Analysis (2025). It was honored with the MICCAI STAR Award (2023) and the ISMRM 2024 Summa Cum Laude Merit Award. |
| Eyal is currently pursuing an MSc in Electrical and Computer Engineering at the Technion, under the joint supervision of Dr. Moti Freiman (Faculty of Biomedical Engineering) and Prof. Israel Cohen (Faculty of Electrical and Computer Engineering). His research focuses on developing deep-learning models with physical constraints for motion correction in medical imaging.
In addition to his academic work, Eyal is a Deep Learning and Computer Vision Algorithm Engineer at WSC Sports. Previously, he worked at GE Research. He earned his BSc in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the Technion. M.Sc. student under the supervision of Prof. Moti Freiman and Prof. Israel Cohen.
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