Quantification of myocardial kinematics in perfusion images from gated SPECT

Left ventricle contractile abnormalities can be an important manifestation of coronary artery disease. The abnormalities in wall motion may represent ischemia or infarction of myocardium. This kind of disease is often regional. It is a fundamental goal of many cardiac imaging modalities and image analysis methods to measure the regional function of the left ventricle (LV). In this work we describe a method to quantify the 3D myocardial kinetic energy (ke) via polar map or ke bull´s eye obtained from gated SPECT images. For each slice a maximum-energy profile is generated by dividing the LV into sectors and taking the highest voxel value within a sector. The map profiles are plotted as concentric circles onto a polar map. Specific sectors show the regional variations of the ke on the LV wall. The current research includes a comparison of ke bull´s eye patterns for normal and abnormal hearts as well as the discrimination capability for the proposed method.