Assessment of Left Ventricular Function in Cardiac MSCT Imaging by a 4D Hierarchical Surface-Volume Matching Process

This article was published in the special issue “Development of Computed Tomography Algorithms” edited by Hengyong Yu, Patrick J. La Riviere, and Xiangyang Tang. Copyright © 2006 Mireille Garreau et al. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.Multislice computed tomography (MSCT) scanners offer new perspectives for cardiac kinetics evaluation with 4D dynamic sequences of high contrast and spatiotemporal resolutions. A new method is proposed for cardiac motion extraction in multislice CT. Based on a 4D hierarchical surface-volume matching process, it provides the detection of the heart left cavities along the acquired sequence and the estimation of their 3D surface velocity fields. A Markov random field model is defined to find, according to topological descriptors, the best correspondences between a 3D mesh describing the left endocardium at one time and the 3D acquired volume at the following time. The global optimization of the correspondences is realized with a multiresolution process. Results obtained on simulated and real data show the capabilities to extract clinically relevant global and local motion parameters and highlight new perspectives in cardiac computed tomography imaging