A Fully 3D System for Cardiac Wall Deformation Analysis in MRI Data

This paper presents an enhanced version of our previous algorithm for point-wise tracking and analysis of cardiac motion based on 3D active mesh model. In the present software, a new 3D active surface model based on curve evolution techniques and level sets is used for automatizing the segmentation of endocardial boundary in the left ventricle in the first phase of cardiac cycle. Furthermore, cardiac muscle anisotropy is modeled and included in the tracking algorithm. Additionally, the tracking algorithm is improved in order to track the left ventriclular wall instead of left ventricular cavity in the previous version. Finally, a quantitative analysis of myocardial strain is performed using the motion estimation obtained by the tracking software. Experiments were performed on cardiac MRI images for tracking the left ventricle myocardium. The results of evaluation on a set of Gradient-Echo images reported in this paper clearly demonstrate the effectiveness of our algorithm for extracting motion parameters.