Functional Analysis of Cardiac MR Images using SPHARM Modeling

Visualization and quantification of cardiac function can provide direct and reliable indicators of cardiac health. The heart’s operation occurs in three dimensions, and is dependent on three dimensional forces and ventricular geometry, making the observation of its shape important. Many approaches have been presented to extract cardiac shape and do functional analysis from a variety of imaging modalities. We apply a spherical harmonics (SPHARM) model to cardiac function analysis using magnetic resonance (MR) images. Our three dimensional SPHARM approach increases measurement accuracy over two dimensional approaches and also simplifies the management and indexing of clinical data by providing access to many important functional measures directly from the SPHARM representation.