QUANTIFICATION OF THE LOCAL HEARTWALL MOTION BY MAGNETIC-RESONANCE MYOCARDIAL TAGGING

Sophisticated magnetic resonance tagging techniques provide powerful t ools for the non-invasive assessment of the local heartwall motion tow ards a deeper fundamental understanding of local heart function. For t he extraction of motion data from the time series of magnetic resonanc e tagged images and for the visualization of the local heartwall motio n a new image analysis procedure has been developed. New parameters ha ve been derived which allows quantification of the motion patterns and are highly sensitive to any changes in these patterns. The new proced ure has been applied for heart motion analysis in healthy volunteers a nd in patient collectives with different heart diseases. The achieved results are summarized and discussed. (C) 1998 Elsevier Science Ltd. A ll rights reserved.