Motion analysis of the right ventricle from MRI images

Abstract

Both normal and abnormal right ventricular (RV) wall motion is not well understood. In this paper, we use data from tagged MRI images to perform the first 3D motion study of the entire right ventricle to date. Our technique is an adaptation of a physics-based deformable modeling methodology that was successfully used on the left ventricle(LV). As opposed to the previous approach, currently we use segmented contours to generate the geometry, ID tags for our input data (due to the thinner RV), and localized degrees of freedom (DOFs) with finite elements. Although we build a biventricular model, our results focus on method validation and visualizing clinically useful parameters that describe RV wall motion.