X-ray and magnetic resonance imaging fusion for cardiac resynchronization therapy.

Cardiac Resynchronization Therapy (CRT) can effectively treat left ventricle (LV) driven Heart Failure (HF). However, 30% of the CRT recipients do not experience symptomatic benefit. Recent studies show that the CRT response rate can reach 95% when the LV pacing lead is placed at an optimal site at a region of maximal LV dyssynchrony and away from myocardial scars.

Multiscale properties of weighted total variation flow with applications to denoising and registration.

Images consist of structures of varying scales: large scale structures such as flat regions, and small scale structures such as noise, textures, and rapidly oscillatory patterns. In the hierarchical (BV, L(2)) image decomposition, Tadmor, et al. (2004) start with extracting coarse scale structures from a given image, and successively extract finer structures from the residuals in each step of the iterative decomposition.

Evaluation of current algorithms for segmentation of scar tissue from late gadolinium enhancement cardiovascular magnetic resonance of the left atrium: an open-access grand challenge.

Background: Late Gadolinium enhancement (LGE) cardiovascular magnetic resonance (CMR) imaging can be used to visualise regions of fibrosis and scarring in the left atrium (LA) myocardium. This can be important for treatment stratification of patients with atrial fibrillation (AF) and for assessment of treatment after radio frequency catheter ablation (RFCA). In this paper we present a standardised evaluation benchmarking framework for algorithms segmenting fibrosis and scar from LGE CMR images.

Automatic functional analysis of left ventricle in cardiac cine MRI.

Rationale And Objectives: A fully automated left ventricle segmentation method for the functional analysis of cine short axis (SAX) magnetic resonance (MR) images was developed, and its performance evaluated with 133 studies of subjects with diverse pathology: ischemic heart failure (n=34), non-ischemic heart failure (n=30), hypertrophy (n=32), and healthy (n=37).

Materials And Methods: The proposed automatic method locates the left ventricle (LV), then for each image detects the contours of the endocardium, epicardium, papillary muscles and trabeculations. Manually and automatically determined contours and functional parameters were compared quantitatively.

Automated quantification of myocardial infarction using graph cuts on contrast delayed enhanced magnetic resonance images.

In this work, we propose a semi-automated myocardial infarction quantification method for cardiac contrast delayed enhancement magnetic resonance images (DE-MRI). Advantages of this method include that it reduces manual contouring of the left ventricle, obviates a remote myocardium region, and automatically distinguishes infarct, healthy and heterogeneous ("gray zone") tissue despite variability in intensity and noise across images. Quantitative evaluation results showed that the automatically determined infarct core and gray zone size have high correlation with that derived from the averaged results of the manual full width at half maximum (FWHM) methods (R(2)=0.