Automatic detection of vessel wall contours from cine-MRI for aortic compliance determination

The aortic compliance is defined as the relative change of aortic cross-sectional area divided by the change in arterial pressure. Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) can be used to evaluate aortic compliance. A knowledge of the aortic contour is essential to determine the aortic area. To prevent important intra-and inter-observer variability, the aortic contours are detected automatically. This work consists in extracting automatically the aortic contour at different phases of the cardiac cycle. An automatic edge detection making use of a Haralick filter and graph searching allows the estimation of aortic cross-sectional area on MR images, from which the aortic compliance is derived