A Unified Framework to Assess Myocardial Function from 4D Images

This paper describes efforts aimed at developing a unified framework to more accurately quantify the local, regional and global function of the left ventricle (LV) of the heart, under both normal and ischemic conditions, using four—dimensional (4D) imaging data over the entire cardiac cycle. The approach incorporates motion information derived from the shape properties of the endocardial and epicardial surfaces of the LV, as well as mid—wall 3D instantaneous velocity information from phase contrast MR images, and/or mid—wall displacement information from tagged MR images. The integration of the disparate but complementary sources of information overcomes the limitations of previous work which concentrates on motion estimation from a single image—derived source. 1