LEFT VENTRICULAR DEFORMATION RECOVERY FROM CINE MRI USING A 4D INCOMPRESSIBLE MODEL

This paper presents a method for the deformation recovery of the left ventricular (LV) wall from cine MRI. The method is based on a 4D deformable model that is incompressible, a desired property since the myocardium has been shown to be nearly incompressible. The 4D model is continuous in time and the three spatial dimensions, which allows the computation of cardiac motion parameters anywhere in space and time including in-between slices and frames. The LV wall needs to be segmented in an initial frame after which the method automatically determines the deformation everywhere in the LV wall throughout the cardiac cycle. The method was tested with 3-D cine MRI for six subjects and it was evaluated against manual segmentation and the corresponding tagged MR image sequences. The average distance between the model and the manually generated endocardial and epicardial surfaces was 1.7 mm (1.2 pixel), and the average distance between the model and the manually determined intersections of perpendicular tag lines was 1.6 mm (1.1 pixel)