Spatio-temporal registration of 2D US and 3D MR images for the characterization of hypertrophic cardiomyopathy

Abstract

A spatio-temporal registration procedure of speckle-tracking echocardiography (STE) and cine magnetic resonance (MR) images is presented. It aims to fuse the mechanical information in STE with the tissue information in MR late-gadolinium-enhanced image (LGE-MR), in order to describe the relationship between left ventricular myocardial strain and macroscopic fibrosis in patients with hypertrophic cardiomyopathy (HCM). The registration was performed between the four-chambers-view STE contours (at rest), and the endocardial surfaces of the left ventricle (LV) from cine-MR short-axis-view sequence. The dynamic LV geometries were described by their Fourier descriptors. This spatio-temporal representation of LV geometries was exploited to avoid the lack of dissimilarity between static geometries. To accomplish this goal, the temporal alignment was performed with the dynamical time warping method. The registration was evaluated on four HCM patients with myocardial fibrosis. First results suggest a relationship between myocardial fibrosis and the modification of the strain curve. © 2013 Springer-Verlag.