Intramyocardial strain estimation from cardiac cine MRI

Area of Science:

• Cardiovascular Imaging
• Biomedical Engineering
• Medical Physics

Background:

• Functional strain parameters are crucial for assessing heart performance and detecting cardiovascular diseases.
• These parameters guide treatment decisions and post-operative follow-up.
• Current methods may have limitations in comprehensive strain analysis.

Purpose of the Study:

• To develop and validate a comprehensive framework for deriving functional strain parameters from conventional cine MRI.
• To enable strain analysis at the endocardium, epicardium, and mid-wall of the left ventricle (LV).
• To enhance the utility of cine MRI for myocardial function characterization.

Main Methods:

• Utilized cine MRI data acquired with balanced steady-state free precession.
• Employed a level set-based deformable model for LV wall segmentation.
• Developed a geometrical Laplace-based method for tracking myocardial points throughout the cardiac cycle.

Main Results:

• The cine MRI-based model demonstrated high agreement with ground truth for peak systolic strain change (within 0.30%) and strain rates (within 0.29%/time).
• The framework proved feasible for in vivo extraction of functional strain parameters.
• The geometrical tracking method accurately followed LV wall points.

Conclusions:

• Automated techniques can derive strain indexes from routine cine MRI images.
• This improves the characterization of myocardial function using cine MRI data.
• The proposed geometrical method offers more accurate strain estimation compared to traditional texture-based tracking.