Joint analysis of heart geometry and kinematics with spatiotemporal active region model

We present a unified cardiac image analysis framework which has the capability to simultaneously recover the geometry and kinematics of the entire left ventricle of the heart, including the endo-, epi-, and mid-wall myocardium. Robust segmentation and motion results are achieved at the same time through the tracking of the spatiotemporal evolution of a mechanics-motivated active region model (ARM). The external forces applied to the ARM are derived from node-dependent imaging data and image-driven measures, statistical priors of the cardiac boundaries, and cyclic motion models of the myocardial tissue elements. The strategy is posed as an energy minimization problem and is solved with finite element representation and iterative procedures. Promising experiment results with canine magnetic resonance phase contrast imaging sequence are presented and discussed.