Planimetric quantification of mitral and tricuspid regurgitations with automatic contour recognition in cine-MRI

Cine-MRI in gradient echo directly visualizes rapid and turbulent flows such as regurgitations. A precise quantification is achieved by planimetry of the signal loss jets, in mitral and tricuspid regurgitations. A first study concern manual contour acquisition and shows that the most accurate quantification parameter is the mean surface area which leads to a correlation of 0.84 with the reference explorations. In a second study, the authors develop a new and fast method for the automatic calculation of the severity grade, which automatically defines signal loss contours. The quality of the authors´ algorithm has been tested, on the one hand, through the correlation between manual and automatic acquisition (r>0.90), and on the other hand, through the correlation between automatic planimetry and the reference scores of severity (0.85<r<0.92), which proved to be an important improvement, in comparison with manual outlining