Heart disease, a major cause of morbidity and mortality in the Western World, generally leads to abnormalities of heart wall motion. However, there are still major difficulties in clinical assessment of heart wall disease due to the use of conventional imaging techniques (e.g., CT, conventional MRI), the lack of sufficient resolution in the extracted data, the absence of computational techniques for automatic extraction of the three-dimensional heart wall motion parameters in a way that is """"""""useful"""""""" to physicians, and the absence of a database of normal patients against which normal and abnormal hearts can be compared.
The aim of this proposal is to use the recently developed at the University of Pennsylvania, magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) technique based on magnetic tagging (""""""""SPAMM"""""""") for modeling and clinically analyzing the cardiac motion. In particular this proposal aims to: 1) develop methods for ventricular analysis and modeling, 2) apply the methods to a combination of previously acquired normal subject data and some additional data in order to construct a novel canonical heart motion model, including dependence on age, gender, race and body size, 3) incorporate the resulting normal database representation in the analysis and modeling tools program to create for an individual subject a 3D visualization of their heart displaying those areas which move abnormally, and 4) use the tool developed in #3 and apply it to a limited series of patients as a preliminary assessment of the utility of these methods and as a guide on how to improve the analysis and display methods. The hypothesis is that due to this type of data (MRI-SPAMM) which shows a much greater degree of precision in 3D, we will be able to reliably distinguish in a quantitative way the above types of disease that are expected to affect cardiac function in characteristic ways. We will test this hypothesis by an already available small representative series of patients, each with a well-defined heart condition. The results of the analysis will be tested against all other available evaluations of the patients studied.
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| Haber, I; Metaxas, D N; Axel, L (2000) Three-dimensional motion reconstruction and analysis of the right ventricle using tagged MRI. Med Image Anal 4:335-55 |
