Pattern recognition of abnormal left ventricle wall motion in cardiac MR

Abstract

There are four main problems that limit application of pattern recognition techniques for recognition of abnormal cardiac left ventricle (LV) wall motion: 1) Normalization of the LV's size, shape, intensity level and position; 2) defining a spatial correspondence between phases and subjects; 3) extracting features; 4) and discriminating abnormal from normal wall motion. Solving these four problems is required for application of pattern recognition techniques to classify the normal and abnormal LV wall motion. In this work, we introduce a normalization scheme to solve the first and second problems. With this scheme, LVs are normalized to the same position, size, and intensity level. Using the normalized images, we proposed an intra-segment classification criterion based on a correlation measure to solve the third and fourth problems. Application of the method to recognition of abnormal cardiac MR LV wall motion showed promising results. © 2009 Springer-Verlag.