Automated magnetic resonance assisted echocardiographic motion analysis

Competing technologies have recently emerged across the spectrum of cardiovascular imaging modalities that study intra-myocardial function, probing promising new parameters such as cardiac strain, twist, and torsion. Displacement encoding with stimulated echoes (DENSE) in cardiac magnetic resonance (cMR) imaging achieves accurate spatiotemporal measurements of tissue motion, but remains expensive and time-consuming. Speckle tracking in echocardiography uses an inexpensive and ubiquitous imaging modality, but often fails to fully capture tissue motion. This project strives to combine the desirable aspects of DENSE cMR and speckle tracking via a novel automated analysis technique termed active trajectory field models (ATFMs). The proposed ATFM analysis characterizes cardiac motion within a training set of DENSE cMR data, and uses this characterization to subsequently recover motion from a noisy and incomplete echocardiographic sequence. We demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed technique via 2D short-axis murine image acquisitions, achieving results comparable to existing semi-automatic echocardiographic motion analysis methods.