Regional myocardial radial velocities estimation from cine MR images Study of a patient-related coefficient effect

Assessment of left ventricular function is crucial for the diagnosis of ischemic heart diseases. A previously developed method to estimate mean time of contraction and radial velocity from cine Cardiac Magnetic Resonance Images (CMRI) is applied on a data base of 45 subjects including 9 normal and 12 patients with heart failure with myocardial infarction, 12 patients with heart failure without myocardial infarction and 12 hypertrophic patients. A major limitation of this method is related to the radial velocity parameter that was poorly estimated. In this paper, an improvement of the estimate of this velocity parameter is presented by introducing a patient related coefficient. The introduced coefficient has shown great improvement of this parameter estimation as from 30% to 75 % for the hypertrophic patients, 41% to 73% for the heart failure without infarction, 49% to 84% for the heart failure with infarction and from 34% to 80% for normal subjects.