Cardiac motion quantification: a new software based on non-rigid registration

Evaluation of regional myocardial function using non-invasive techniques is an important goal in clinical cardiology. This work presents a new methodology and software developed for this task, its main features are the visualization and quantification of the motion and deformation of the myocardial wall along the cardiac cycle, using sequences of ultrasound or magnetic resonance images. The software measures displacement of the different sections of the cardiac wall, and calculates velocity, strain and strain rate, in their radial and longitudinal or circumferential components. These parameters can also be displayed as a parametric image in color superposed to the original one. To evaluate the software and method, a clinical trial has been carried out on 12 sequences of healthy subjects and 12 sequences of patients, showing that this application could be a useful tool for the diagnosis of cardiac ischemic disease.