Pressure-based Vortex Extraction in Cardiac 4D PC-MRI Blood Flow Data

Abstract

We propose a technique for vortex extraction in cardiac 4D PC-MRI blood flow data that employs an intravascular, relative pressure calculation. The method is easy to implement, runs fully automatically, and requires no user-defined parameters. We qualitatively evaluated 100+ datasets of the aorta, pulmonary artery, or left ventricle from healthy volunteers as well as from patients acquired with different MR scanners. In all cases, the results suffer from significantly less noise than comparable approaches using the common λ 2 vortex criterion.