Exploratory analysis of the spatio-temporal deformation of the myocardium during systole from tagged MRI

Myocardial contractile function is, with perfusion, one of the main affected factors in ischemic heart diseases. In this paper, we propose an original framework based on functional data analysis for the quantitative study of spatio-temporal parameters related to the myocardial contraction mechanics. The mechanical strains in the left-ventricular (LV) myocardium are computed from tagged magnetic resonance imaging cardiac sequences. A statistical functional model of the normal contractile function of the LV is build from the study of eight examinations on healthy subjects. We show that it is possible to detect abnormal strain patterns comparatively to this model, by generating distance maps at rest and under pharmacological stress. We demonstrate the consistency of the results for the circumferential deformation parameter on healthy and pathological data sets.