The use of contrast medium in cardiac MRI allows joining the high-resolution anatomical information provided by standard magnetic resonance with functional information obtained by means of the perfusion of contrast agent in myocardial tissues. The current approach to perfusion MRI characterization is the qualitative one, based on visual inspection of images. Moving to quantitative analysis requires extraction of numerical indices of myocardium perfusion by analysis of time/intensity curves related to the area of interest. The main problem in quantitative image sequence analysis is the heart movement, mainly due to patient respiration. We propose an automatic procedure based on image registration, segmentation of the myocardium, and extraction and analysis of time/intensity curves. The procedure requires a minimal user interaction, is robust with respect to the user input, and allows effective characterization of myocardial perfusion. The algorithm was tested on cardiac MR images acquired from voluntaries and in clinical routine.
This article is part of the series Advances in Modality-Oriented Medical Image Processing.
Research Article Automatic Characterization of Myocardial Perfusion in Contrast Enhanced MRI
1 Institute of Clinical Physiology, National Research Council, Via Moruzzi, 1 Loc San Cataldo, Pisa 56100, Italy
2 Department of Information Engineering, University of Pisa, Via Diotisalvi 2, Pisa 56122, Italy
EURASIP Journal on Advances in Signal Processing 2003, 2003:760802 doi:10.1155/S1110865703211057
The electronic version of this article is the complete one and can be found online at: http://asp.eurasipjournals.com/content/2003/5/760802
| Received: | 29 January 2002 |
| Revisions received: | 16 October 2002 |
| Published: | 14 April 2003 |
© 2003 Copyright © 2003 Hindawi Publishing Corporation
close
Sign up to receive new article alerts from EURASIP Journal on Advances in Signal Processing
