Research On Left Ventricular Motion Tracking And Strain Analysis From Cine MR Images

Left ventricle (LV) is the most important component of heart and it is the main research object of cardiac imaging. The motion information of left ventricle can reflect the pumping function of the heart. The study of myocardial motion is essential for understanding the normal heart function. Quantitative measurements of left ventricular strain are important in the diagnosis and management of patients with heart disease and tracking the efficacy of treatments over time. Therefore, motion tracking and strain analysis of left ventricle has become a hotspot in the relative researching field.The algorithms and development status of LV myocardial deformation and strain in the domestic and international references are presented in detail. Compared with tagged MRI, cine MRI has obvious advantages in LV myocardial motion analysis. In this paper, based on the ideas of image texture analysis and motion tracking, a new method is presented for left ventricular motion tracking and strain analysis from cine MR images. First, making use of the idea of tracking tag points and tag line used in tagged MR images, the marking points are extracted. Second, using the tree-structured wavelet algorithm to construct the wavelet-based attribute vector (WAV), the corresponding marking points of the extracted points are matched and the sparse displacement field is calculated between the LV consecutive frames. Next, applying radial point interpolation with polynomial basis functions, which is used in the meshfree method, the dense displacement field is interpolated. Finally, LV strain is analyzed and strain maps are displayed for clinical diagnosis.The experimental results show that our method is precise enough and has low computational cost than the traditional methods which calculate the dense displacement field directly. As a conclusion, the method in this paper is feasible and effective, which can allow quantifying regional myocardial function. At last, a summary on this study was described. The prospect of motion tracking and strain analysis of left ventricle is also proposed.