Tracking and analysis of cine-delayed enhancement MR

Cine-DEMR is a new cardiac imaging technique which combines aspects of Cine and Delayed Enhancement MR. Like Cine, it displays the heart beating over time allowing for the detection of motion abnormalities. Like DEMR, non-viable (dead) tissues appear with increased signal intensity (it has been shown that the extent of non-viable tissue in the left ventricle (LV) of the heart is a direct indicator of patient survival rate). We present a technique for tracking the myocardial borders in this modality and classifying myocardial pixels as viable or non-viable. Tracking is performed using an affine deformed template of borders manually drawn on the first phase of the series and refined using an ASM-like approach. Classification employs a Support Vector Machine trained on DEMR data. We applied our technique on 75 images culled from 5 patient data sets.