Left ventricle vortex detection by 3D + t phase contrast MRI: a feasibility study

44th Congress of the Société de Biomécanique, Poitiers, FRANCE, 28-/10/2019 - 30/10/2019The motivation to focus on coherent structure detection in cardiovascular systems is two-fold: 1) the ability to reliably detect abnormal inefficient flow patterns from a normal optimal state; and 2) the detection of flow conditions conducive to secondary pathological processes such as thrombosis - as the coherent structures are thought to perform an important role in avoiding stasis by ?washing out' the cardiac cavities (e.g. the atrial appendage or LV apex; Birdwell et al. 1978). Detection of the coherent structures could be performed using a number of different vorticity criteria, such as: threshold of vorticity magnitude, Q-criterion and ?2-criterion. However, prior application and evaluation of these different criteria in the cardiovascular system by 3D?+?t phase contrast (PC) flow MRI is limited as most approaches have used ?2- or Q-criteria (Elbaz et al. 2014) without comparison with other approaches. There is therefore a need to more broadly assess the capacity of these criteria to detect and describe coherent structures. Initial work by Garcia et al. (2013), reported the influence of noise and the spatial resolution of helicity. An alternative approach using data clustering has been reported by Wong et al. (2010). The primary aim of this work is to compare criteria for the assessment of coherent structures in the left ventricle by 3D?+?t PC flow MRI in healthy volunteers. To investigate the influence of diastolic function on the coherent structures in healthy volunteers detected by different criteria (vorticity, Q- or ?2-criteria) is the second aim of this work