Computerised planning of the acquisition of cardiac MR images

A method to automatically plan acquisition of magnetic resonance images aligned with the cardiac axes is presented. Localiser images are acquired with a mean short axis orientation calculated from a group of (n=50) adult patients. These images are segmented using the expectation maximization algorithm. The borders of the ventricular blood pools are found and used to provide an estimate of the orientation of the cardiac axes. These estimated orientations are compared with corresponding manually aligned orientations. The method has been tested on n=12 volunteers showing an error of within 12 degrees which is sufficiently accurate for clinical use.