Three-Dimensional Motion Reconstruction and Analysis of the Right Ventricle Using Tagged MRI

Right ventricular (RV) dysfunction can serve as an indicator of heart and lung disease and can adversely affect the left ventricle (LV). However, normal RV function must be characterized before abnormal states can be detected. We can describe a method for reconstructing the 3D motion of the RV images by fitting of a deformable model to extracted tag and contour data from multiview tagged magnetic resonance images(MRI). The deformable model is a biventricular finite element mesh built directly from the contours. Our approach accommodates the geometrically complex RV by using the entire lengths of the tags, localized degrees of freedom (DOFs), and finite elements for geometric modeling. We convert the results of the reconstruction into potentially useful motion variables, such as strains and displacements. The fitting technique is applied to synthetic data, two normal hearts, and a heart with right ventricular hypertrophy (RVH). The results in this paper are limited to the RV free wall and septum. We find noticeable differences between the motion variables calculated for the normal volunteers and the RVH patient