Determination of heart valve fluttering by analyzing pixel frequency

Abstract

The fluttering of heart valve leaflets is an important aspect regarding the hemodynamics of biological artificial heart valves. Endoscopic high speed recordings allow capturing, visualization and analysis of heart valve movements with significant temporal resolution. In this contribution, a method is presented to determine the fluttering of the leaflets by analyzing the pixel frequency. The intensity value of each image pixel is observed over time and analyzed using Fourier transform. With synthetic sequences the reliability of the method has been proven. First results with ex-vivo recordings show the feasibility to determine fluttering of heart valve leaflets. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2012.