Spatio-temporal dimension reduction of cardiac motion for group-wise analysis and statistical testing

Given the observed abnormal motion dynamics of patients with heart conditions, quantifying cardiac motion in both normal and pathological cases can provide useful insights for therapy planning. In order to be able to analyse the motion over multiple subjects in a robust manner, it is desirable to represent the motion by a low number of parameters. We propose a reduced order cardiac motion model, reduced in space through a polyaffine model, and reduced in time by statistical model order reduction. The method is applied to a data-set of synthetic cases with known ground truth to validate the accuracy of the left ventricular motion tracking, and to validate a patient-specific reduced-order motion model. Population-based statistics are computed on a set of 15 healthy volunteers to obtain separate spatial and temporal bases. Results demonstrate that the reduced model can efficiently detect abnormal motion patterns and even allowed to retrospectively reveal abnormal unnoticed motion within the control subjects.