Exploration of Interventricular Septum Motion in Multi-Cycle Cardiac MRI

Abstract

Function of the heart, including interventricular septum motion, is influenced by respiration and contraction of the heart muscle. Recent real-time magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) can acquire multi-cycle cardiac data, which enables the analysis of the variation between heart cycles depending on factors such as physical stress or changes in respiration. There are no normal values for this variation in the literature, and there are no established tools for the analysis and exploration of such multi-cycle data available. We propose an analysis and exploration concept that automatically segments the left and right ventricle, extracts motion parameters and allows to interactively explore the results. We tested the concept using nine real-time MRI data sets, including one subject under increasing stress levels and one subject performing a breathing maneuver. All data sets could be automatically processed and then explored successfully, suggesting that our approach can robustly quantify and explore septum thickness in real-time MRI data.