Towards an Enhanced Tool for Quantifying the Degree of LV Hyper-Trabeculation

Area of Science:

• Cardiology
• Medical Imaging
• Computational Biology

Background:

• Left ventricular non-compaction (LVNC) is characterized by increased endomyocardial trabeculations.
• Hypertrabeculation often indicates underlying genetic cardiomyopathies.
• Current quantification methods for LV trabeculae are limited.

Purpose of the Study:

• To enhance a software tool (QLVTHCI) for accurate and automatic quantification of LV trabeculae degree in patients with genetic cardiomyopathies.
• To improve diagnostic accuracy and efficiency in identifying LVNC.

Main Methods:

• Development and evaluation of the QLVTHCI software tool using cardiac magnetic resonance images from 59 patients.
• Implementation of parallelization for real-time processing of patient data.
• Comparison of QLVTHCI with a fractal-based method for differentiating LVNC and non-LVNC patients.

Main Results:

• QLVTHCI provides accurate measurements of LV compact and trabecular volumes, proportions, and masses.
• The tool achieved substantial time savings compared to manual processes by cardiologists.
• QLVTHCI demonstrated full diagnostic accuracy (100%) in differentiating LVNC from non-LVNC patients, outperforming a fractal-based method (78%).
• Parallelization resulted in speed-ups ranging from 7.5 to 1500.

Conclusions:

• The enhanced QLVTHCI software offers an accurate, automatic, and time-efficient solution for quantifying left ventricular trabeculations in genetic cardiomyopathies.
• QLVTHCI significantly improves diagnostic accuracy for LVNC detection.
• The software's accessibility and lower cost promote reproducibility in clinical settings.