Strain analysis from 4-D cardiac CT image data

Strain is a discriminative parameter of regional myocardial dysfunction. Despite the large body of research on myocardial strain analysis in echocardiography and MR images, such techniques have not often been applied to cardiac CT data. Reasons for this include the challenges of sparse image deformation clues and the low temporal resolution. In the current study, we propose an algorithm that uses cardiac CT data to evaluate the mechanical function of the left ventricle. The algorithm is based on a deformable LV model that contains both the myocardium and the blood pool regions and that accounts for the elasticity and incompressibility of the myocardium with the rapid contraction of the blood pool. Our algorithm uses the image intensities of the trabeculle and papillary muscles as well as the border edges in an optical flow manner to extract the 3-D velocities. The resulting strains and rotational values derived from a set of normal patients correlate highly with values from the research literature. We validated our algorithm against 2-D speckle tracking analysis and against visual scores obtained by an expert. Our study shows that strain analysis using CT data can be used in clinical practice.