Analysis of tagged cardiac MRI sequences

Abstract

The non invasive evaluation of the cardiac function presents a great interest for the diagnosis of cardiovascular diseases. Tagged cardiac MRI allows the measurement of anatomical and functional myocardial parameters. This protocol generates a dark grid which is deformed with the myocardium displacement on both Short-Axis (SA) and LongAxis (LA) frames in a time sequence. Tracking the grid allows the estimation of the displacement inside the myocardium. The work described in this paper aims to make the automatic tracking of the grid of tags on cardiac MRI sequences robust and reliable, thanks to an informational formalism based on Extreme Physical Informational (EPI). This approach leads to the development of an original diffusion pre-processing allowing us to increase significantly the robustness of the detection and the follow-up of the grid of tags. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2005.