Quantification of Regional Left Ventricular Dyssynchrony by Magnetic Resonance Imaging

Abstract—Cardiac resynchronization therapy is an established treatment in patients with symptomatic heart failure and intra-ventricular conduction delay. Electrical dyssynchrony is typically adopted to represent myocardial activation dyssynchrony, which should be compensated by cardiac resynchronization therapy. One third of the patients, however, does not respond to the therapy. Therefore, imaging modalities aimed at the mechanical dyssyn-chrony estimation have been recently proposed to improve patient selection criteria. This paper presents a novel fully automated method for regional mechanical left ventricular dyssynchrony quantification in short-axis magnetic resonance imaging. The endocardial movement is described by time-displacement curves with respect to an automatically determined reference point. Different methods are proposed for time-displacement curve analysis aimed at the regional contraction timing estimation. These methods were evaluated in two groups of subjects with (nine patients) and without (six patients) left bundle branch block. The contraction timing standard deviation showed a significant increase for left bundle branch block patients with all the methods. A novel method based on phase spectrum analysis may be how-ever preferred due to a better specificity (99.7%) and sensitivity (99.0%). In conclusion, this method provides a valuable prog-nostic indicator for heart failure patients with dyssynchronous ventricular contraction and it opens new possibilities for regional timing analysis. Index Terms—Biomedical measurement, cardiology, magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), medical image processing. I