Quantification of gaps in ablation lesions around the pulmonary veins in delayed enhancement MRI

Abstract

We propose a method for measuring the quality of pulmonary vein isolation in delayed enhancement MRI images for the patients that underwent atrial radiofrequency ablation. To that end we construct a graph from an anatomy independent representation of the atrium, where every node represents a scar lesion and the edges are the distances between the lesions. Subsequently we search for the shortest path in this graph. The total amount of gap between the scar lesions is measured as the fraction of the path’s length that passes through the healthy tissue. We illustrate the proposed technique using pre-segmented atria from a freely available database and show that the proposed approach is able to measure the amount of gaps in the scar isolating the PV’s as well as provide a meaningful definition of the gap in cases where the scar lesions are patchy and not continuous.