Evaluation of cardiac left ventricular mass from Tagged Magnetic Resonance Imaging

Tagged Magnetic Resonance Imaging (tMRI) is considered the gold standard for quantitative assessment of the cardiac regional function. However, quantification of the global function from tMRI is challenging due to the low contrast between myocardium and blood in these images, and hence, prevents the accurate segmentation of the myocardium. In this work, a method for enhancing the myocardium-to-blood contrast in tagged MR images is presented. First, the tag pattern in tMRI is removed by accurately suppressing the frequency components of the tag pattern to produce tagless images. Then, the image contrast is enhanced by estimating the local standard deviation and using it to suppress the blood signal intensity. The proposed method is applied on a dataset for 12 patients to calculate the global cardiac functional parameters. The results are then compared to those calculated from standard cine MRI image sequences of the same patients. The results show that the proposed method can be used to accurately estimate the left ventricular volume and mass.