A new method to assess the velocity vector field in a beating heart

The estimation of left ventricle motion and deformation from a series of images has been an area of attention in medical image analysis, and still remains an open and challenging research problem. The proper motion tracking of the left ventricle wall can contribute to isolating the location and extent of ischemic or infarcted myocardium. We present a completely new methodology to automatically estimate velocity vector fields for a beating heart based on the study of the variation in frequency content in a time series of non-stationary images. A synthetic phantom validation and results obtained from cardiac SPECT images are also presented