Myocardial twist from X-ray angiography: Can we observe left ventricular twist in rotational coronary angiography?

Abstract

We present preliminary evidence that left ventricular twist can be observed and thus estimated from rotational coronary angiography. Our method is based on an ellipsoidal parametric model initially developed for functional analysis of cardiac tagged MRI. First, we fit the model to 3D coronary artery centerlines reconstructed from rotational angiography and then use 3D/2D registration to optimize for the functional parameters driving the model. On two clinical acquisitions, we show that our method is able to recover cardiac motion indicated by an average reduction in reprojection error of 28.1±3.0%. Analysis of the functional progression of the functional parameters over time reveals radial and longitudinal contraction, and left ventricular twist. We believe that these results are exciting and encourage improvement of the proposed method in future work.