Left ventricular wall motion estimation with tagged cine MR images: software development

Quantitative analysis of left ventricle (LV) wall motion with imaging modalities is of a great interest for cardiac diagnostics as well as for basic physiological studies of cardiac wall shear. Some parameters (thickness, thickening, wall stress) related to the functional behavior of the myocardium, can be approximated from 2D endocardial and epicardial contours from end-systolic and end-diastolic LV cross-sections. However, direct assessment of segmental and circumferential myocardial shortening requires invasive methods unless considering the use of radio frequency (RF) tissue tagging cine-MRI. In order to estimate these functional parameters based on MR images from DANTE sequences, we developed a multi-platform interactive software program written in C programming language. This software will help us to process tagged images examination in a routine clinical basis.