Myocardial kinematics based on tagged MRI from volumetric NURBS models

Abstract

We present current research in which left ventricular deformation is estimated from tagged cardiac magnetic resonance imaging using volumetric deformable models constructed from nonuniform rational B-splines (NURBS). From a set of short and long axis images at end-diastole, the initial NURBS model is constructed by fitting two surfaces with the same parameterization to the set of epicardial and endocardial contours from which a volumetric model is created. Using normal displacements of the three sets of orthogonal tag planes as well as displacements of both tag line and contour/tag line intersection points, one can solve for the optimal homogeneous coordinates, in a least squares sense, of the control points of the NURBS model at a later time point using quadratic programming. After fitting to all time points of data, lofting the NURBS model at each time point creates a comprehensive 4-D NURBS model. From this model, we can extract 3-D myocardial displacement fields and corresponding strain maps, which are local measures of non-rigid deformation.