Cardiac motion extraction in multislice computed tomography by using a 3D hierarchical surface matching process

Retrospective data reconstruction provided in multislice computed tomography (MSCT) scanners offers new perspectives for cardiac kinetics evaluation with volume sequences of high spatial and temporal resolutions. A new method is proposed for cardiac motion extraction in MSCT. It is based on a 3D surface matching process associated to a hierarchical description of shapes. It provides 3D velocity fields associated to the left ventricle inner surface, which can be used for global and local motion quantification. 3D segmentation and surface reconstruction processes are first applied on each volume to obtain one mesh representation for each time. A hierarchical surface matching scheme is then performed: mesh nodes are selected as entities and matched according to a local energy. A simulated annealing is used to perform a global optimisation of the correspondences. First results obtained on simulated and real data show the good behavior of this method.