Cardiac MRI Model-free Reconstruction of Myocardial Strain from Tagged MR Images

Introduction
One of the challanges faced by the modern cardiologist is the diagnosis of myocardial (heart muscle) viability after a heart attack. A number of tools have been developed for this purpose, including echocardiography and tagged MRI, but until this point, development of the latter has been limited by calculation time and required manual intervention. It is our purpose to develop techniques which will allow a vast majority of the analysis to be performed without human intervention, allowing the cardiac MRI to become clinically accessible.

Our development approach consists of several new ideas:

• Using statistical estimation techniques to determine the boundries between myocardial and non-myocardial tissues and preserve tag line discontinuities.
• Strain and contour calculations are interleaved so that both are computed cooperatively.
• Use of a finite difference model which does not require a specific coordinate system, as oppsed to the finite element model used in other reconstructions.

The Reconstruction Process Image Acquisition and Inital conditions Tag Indentification Displacement and Strain Reconstruction Papers and Publications Other Web Resources

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Research by Dr. Thomas S. Denney, Jr., Ph.D
Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Auburn University, Auburn, Alabama
Email: dennets@auburn.edu

Supported by grants from:

All images used for this research project were provided by John's Hopkins Medical Imaging Lab
courtesy of Dr. Elliot McVeigh.

Best viewed at 800 X 600 resolution

Summer 1999