Medical Imaging 2004

Abstract

Measuring changes in cardiac motion patterns can assist in diagnosing the onset of arrhythmia and ischaemia and in the follow-up of treatment. This work presents a methodology for measuring such motion changes from MR images. Non-rigid registration is used to track cardiac motion in a sequence of 3D tagged MR images. We use a cylindrical coordinate system to subdivide the myocardium
into smaller anatomically meaningful regions and to express motion derived measurements such as displacement and strain for each myocardial region during the cardiac cycle. In the first experiment we have evaluated the proposed methods using synthetic image sequences where the ground truth was available. These images were generated using a cardiac motion simulator for tagged MRI. Normal and abnormal motion fields were produced by modifying parameters in
a small region of the myocardium. In the second experiment we have acquired two separate tagged MR image sequences from five healthy volunteers. Both acquisitions have been carried out without moving the volunteer inside the scanner, thus avoiding potential misregistration errors due to subject motion between scans. In
addition, one of volunteers was subjected to stress during one of the
scans. In the final experiment we acquired tagged MR images from a patient with super-ventricular tachyarrhythmia, before and after radio frequency ablation. The image acquisition and catheter intervention were performed with a combined X-ray and MRI system. Detection results were correct on synthetic data and no region was incorrectly classified as having significant changes in the repetition studies. Significant changes in motion pattern were measured in the stress and ablation studies. Furthermore, results seem to corroborate that the ablation regularised cardiac contraction.© (2004) COPYRIGHT SPIE--The International Society for Optical Engineering. Downloading of the abstract is permitted for personal use only.