Cardiac Motion Analysis Using Nonlinear Biomechanical Constraints

Quantitative assessment of the motion and deformation variability of the heart has important implications for the understanding, diagnosis, and treatment of cardiac diseases. Various existing image-based approaches typically rely on linear constraining models which are however physically implausible. In this paper, we present a biomechanically constrained framework for the estimation of left ventricle deformation from medical image sequences using more realistic nonlinear geometry and material models. Once the myocardial boundaries and the sparse corresponding boundary points are derived from an active region model, we construct the cardiac dynamics where the left ventricle is modelled as an Mooney-Rivlin material undergoing large deformation. We then rely on the Newmark scheme to perform frame-to-frame estimation of the cardiac motion/deformation parameters. Experiments have been performed with 3D cardiac MR image sequences with very encouraging results