Non-invasive recovery of dynamic 4D cardiac motion and deformation is very important, from both clinical and physiological/biomechanical research point of view. The intent of the proposed efforts is to study and develop continuum mechanical model based, integrated approach to more accurately and objectively quantify the motion/deformation of the left ventricle (LV) of the heart, under both normal and ischemic conditions. A realistic biomechanical LV model will allow us to incorporate actual physical constraints in the recovery process to achieve more accurate and robust results, while integration of information from different but complementary image or image-derived sources will overcome some of the limitations of each single source. The system will be embedded in a finite element analysis framework. Real images will be used in the evaluation of the approach, and the algorithm-derived results will be compared to the implanted physical marker-derived results for validation purpose.
