PHYSICAL AND GEOMETRICAL MODELING FOR IMAGE-BASED RECOVERY OF LEFT-VENTRICULAR DEFORMATION

Information about left ventricular (LV) mechanical performance is of c ritical importance in understanding the etiology of ischemic heart dis ease. Regional measurements derived from non-invasive imaging to assis t in assessing this performance have been in use for decades, and cert ain parameters derived from these measurements often are useful clinic ally, as they correlate to some extent with gross physiological hypoth eses. However, relatively little work has been done to date to careful ly understand the relationship of regional myocardial injury to the lo cal mechanical performance of the heart as derived from image data acq uired non-invasively for a particular patient in 3 spatial dimensions over time. This paper describes efforts to take advantage of recent de velopments in 3D non-invasive imaging and biomechanical modeling to de sign an integrated computational platform capable of assembling a vari ety of displacement and velocity data derived from each image frame to deform a volumetric model representation of a portion of the myocardi um. A brief description of the reasoning behind this strategy an overv iew of the approach and some initial results are described. (C) 1998 E lsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.