Left-ventricular Diastolic Functional Analysis Based on Short-axis Cine Cardiac Mri

Session XII: Saturday, February 3, 2007 478. EFFICIENT, ACCURATE AND ROBUST LEFT-VENTRICULAR DIASTOLIC FUNCTIONAL ANALYSIS BASED ON SHORT-AXIS CINE CARDIAC MRI Marcel Breeuwer, PhD, Gilion Hautvast. Philips Medical Systems, Best, The Netherlands. Introduction: Congestive heart failure is increasingly becoming a problem in the elderly population and is associated with an increased morbidity and mortality. Diastolic dysfunction is an important cause of congestive heart failure. It often occurs when systolic function is still normal. Analysis of diastolic function is, therefore, becoming an important clinical application. Conventionally, diastolic functional analysis is performed on the basis of Nuclear Medicine or Echocardiography (1, 2). Purpose: We present a method for the almost automatic determination of diastolic functional parameters from short-axis cine CMR images. We furthermore present the assessment of the accuracy and robustness of the method. Methods: The diastolic functional parameters are derived from the volume over time curve v(t) of the left ventricle. This volume curve is obtained by first semi-automatically segmenting the left-ventricular blood pool from the cine cardiac MR images for all slices and phases using a method presented in (3) and subsequently calculating the volume per phase using the well-known Simpson’s Rule. After a spline-based temporal interpolation, the first order derivative (dv/dt) is determined and the following diastolic functional parameters are automatically estimated using FIG. 1. Parameters derived from the volume curve v(t). FIG. 2. Example of synthetic volume curve with detected diastolic