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Updated: May 3, 2026
Morphological and Functional Assessment of the Right Ventricle Using 3D Echocardiography
Published on: October 28, 2020
4D-analysis of left ventricular heart cycle using procrustes motion analysis
Paolo Piras1, Antonietta Evangelista2, Stefano Gabriele3
1Dipartimento di Scienze, Università Roma Tre, Roma, Italy ; Dipartimento di Scienze Cardiovascolari, Respiratorie, Nefrologiche, Anestesiologiche e Geriatriche, Sapienza-Università di Roma, Roma, Italy ; Center for Evolutionary Ecology, Roma, Italy.
Insights
This study introduces a novel method to analyze cardiac motion trajectories, differentiating healthy subjects from those with aortic insufficiency. The approach effectively captures dynamic heart changes over time, revealing distinct patterns in disease states.
Area of Science:
- Cardiovascular Research
- Biomedical Engineering
- Geometric Morphometrics
Background:
- Understanding human left ventricular morphology and its dynamic changes is crucial for diagnosing cardiac conditions.
- Current methods may not adequately capture the complex, time-varying nature of heart morphology during the cardiac cycle.
Purpose of the Study:
- To investigate time-varying morphological changes in the human left ventricle.
- To develop and apply a novel strategy for comparing cardiac cycle's morphological trajectories.
- To differentiate healthy subjects from patients with aortic insufficiency based on dynamic heart morphology.
Main Methods:
- Utilized 3D Speckle Tracking Echocardiography (STE) to obtain data.
- Employed semi-automated landmark detection for left ventricular morphology.
- Applied an extended Geometric Morphometrics toolkit and Riemannian Parallel Transport ('linear shift') for trajectory analysis.
Main Results:
- Standard morphometric analysis failed to distinguish dynamic trajectory shapes.
- The novel 'linear shift' method successfully differentiated patients with aortic insufficiency from healthy subjects based on motion trajectory.
- Inter-individual variations in healthy subjects did not significantly affect trajectory shape or orientation.
- Volumetric contraction, torsion, and twist were unevenly distributed across different axes.
Conclusions:
- Dynamic analysis of cardiac motion trajectories offers superior diagnostic capability compared to static analysis for conditions like aortic insufficiency.
- The proposed Riemannian Parallel Transport method provides a robust framework for analyzing time-varying morphological data.
- Inter-individual morphological differences do not dictate the fundamental patterns of left ventricular function during the cardiac cycle in healthy individuals.
Abstract:
The aim of this study is to investigate human left ventricular heart morphological changes in time among 17 healthy subjects. Preliminarily, 2 patients with volumetric overload due to aortic insufficiency were added to our analyses. We propose a special strategy to compare the shape, orientation and size of cardiac cycle's morphological trajectories in time. We used 3D data obtained by Speckle Tracking Echocardiography in order to detect semi-automated and homologous landmarks clouds as proxies of left ventricular heart morphology. An extended Geometric Morphometrics toolkit in order to distinguish between intra- and inter-individual shape variations was used. Shape of trajectories with inter-individual variation were compared under the assumption that trajectories attributes, estimated at electrophysiologically homologous times are expressions of left ventricular heart function. We found that shape analysis as commonly applied in Geometric Morphometrics studies fails in identifying a proper morpho-space to compare the shape of morphological trajectories in time. To overcome this problem, we performed a special type of Riemannian Parallel Transport, called "linear shift". Whereas the two patients with aortic insufficiency were not differentiated in the static shape analysis from the healthy subjects, they set apart significantly in the analyses of motion trajectory's shape and orientation. We found that in healthy subjects, the variations due to inter-individual morphological differences were not related to shape and orientation of morphological trajectories. Principal Component Analysis showed that volumetric contraction, torsion and twist are differently distributed on different axes. Moreover, global shape change appeared to be more correlated with endocardial shape change than with the epicardial one. Finally, the total shape variation occurring among different subjects was significantly larger than that observable across properly defined morphological trajectories.
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