Modeling of 3D Left Ventricular motion to evaluate paced myocardial function

Pacemaker is widely used to help control abnormal heart rhythms. In this paper, we propose to evaluate the paced myocardial function by building a Three-Dimensional (3D) mechanical motion model of Left Ventricular (LV), in order to optimize the pacing models. We first create a 3D standard LV model based on manually segmented LV segments by experienced clinicians. The mechanical motion of LV is further measured using Two-Dimensional (2D) Ultrasonic Doppler Tissue Velocity (DTV) imaging, and correlated with the 3D LV model by Mutual Information (MI) based non-rigid registration methods. Such multiple 2D motion images are then mapped to the 3D LV model by interpolation. The preliminary experiments are carried out by comparing the myocardial function before and after pacemaker implantation, and prove the promising feasibility of our proposed method.