In-vivo strain and stress estimation of the left ventricle from MRI images

Abstract

Little information is known about in-vivo heart strain and stress distribution. In this paper, we present a novel statistical model to estimate the in-vivo material properties and strain and stress distribution in the left ventricle. The displacements of the heart wall are reconstructed in previous work of our group by using MRI-SPAMM tagging technique and deformable model. Based on the reconstructed displacements, we developed the statistical model to estimate strain and stress by using EM algorithm. Two normal hearts and two hearts with right-ventricular hypertrophy are studied. We find noticeable differences in the strain and stress estimated for normal and abnormal hearts.