Monitoring Treatment Outcome: A Visualization Prototype for Left Ventricular Transformation

The analysis of cardiac dynamics – especially of the left ventricle – is a means for evaluating the healthiness of the heart. In case that a malfunction has been detected and afterwards has been treated, the question arises whether the treatment was successful or not. On a longer time scale, it is of clinical interest to compare the results of follow-up studies with those of former examinations. In this paper, we address both issues by presenting a visualization prototype for the comparison of left ventricular dynamics obtained from cine-MRI data. Our approach is based on the computation of differences for standard cardiac parameters between two time series which have been acquired prior to and after treatment. For their visualization, we use a series of bull’s-eye displays allowing for an in-depth examination of the treatment outcome. Here, we focus on the special clinical application ventricular reduction surgery where we perform a retrospective evaluation for cine-MRI data acquired prior to and right after surgery as well as several months later. We compare our results with diagnosis information obtained from clinical experts.