Fully automatic left ventricular myocardial strain estimation in 2D short-axis tagged magnetic resonance imaging.

Fully automatic left ventricular myocardial strain estimation in 2D short-axis tagged magnetic resonance imaging. Phys Med Biol. 2017 Aug 07;62(17):6899-6919 Authors: Morais P, Queirós S, Heyde B, Engvall J, 'hooge JD, Vilaça JL Abstract Cardiovascular diseases are among the leading causes of death and frequently result in local myocardial dysfunction. Among the numerous imaging modalities available to detect these dysfunctional regions, cardiac deformation imaging through tagged magnetic resonance imaging (t-MRI) has been an attractive approach. Nevertheless, fully automatic analysis of these data sets is still challenging. In this work, we present a fully automatic framework to estimate left ventricular myocardial deformation from t-MRI. This strategy performs automatic myocardial segmentation based on B-spline explicit active surfaces, which are initialized using an annular model. A non-rigid image-registration technique is then used to assess myocardial deformation. Three experiments were set up to validate the proposed framework using a clinical database of 75 patients. First, automatic segmentation accuracy was evaluated by comparing against manual delineations at one specific cardiac phase. The proposed solution showed an average perpendicular distance error of 2.35  ±  1.21 mm and 2.27  ±  1.02 mm for the endo- and epicardium, respectively. Second, starting from either manual or automatic segmentation,...
Source: Physics in Medicine and Biology - Category: Physics Authors: Tags: Phys Med Biol Source Type: research