A magnetic resonance image processing system for cardiac research

Analysis of magnetic resonance images (MRI) is often limited to hardware and software provided by the manufacturer. To circumvent this problem the authors developed a Unix-based system using a Sun S3/60 workstation. They acquire multiple series of ECG (electrocardiogram) gated images. Typically in a single acquisition there are four oblique long-axis slices centered around the left ventricle (LV) at eight points during the cardiac cycle. The images are transferred to 9-track tape and decoded using Unix-based scripts so that all demographic and image data is retained. The images are loaded in the Sun system and converted to a Sun window raster format. Once in this format the images can be easily manipulated by a variety of methods. The authors provide for the cine display at 16 frames/s, contrast and pseudocolor enhancement, and 2-D LV and blood pool reconstruction. The system is thus a promising one for the manipulation and analysis of cardiac MRI data