Abstract

Cardiac strain is frequently measured by doctors as a means of monitoring cardiac performance. This provides feedback on such disorders as myocardial infarction (or "heart attack") where damage has been done to the heart muscle. The Centre for Magnetic Resonance (at the University of Queensland) in collaboration with the Wesley and Royal Brisbane Hospitals is about to invest in three MRI scanners which will be arriving later on this year. One of the major projects carried out using these scanners will be the measurement of cardiac strain.

The image processing software being written for this project can be broken down into three steps :

a) Tracking the displacement of taglines on the heart using active contours or snakes,

b) Fitting a thin plate spline to the tagline displacements to generate an overall displacement surface, and

c) Calculating strain maps from the displacement surfaces.

An overview of this software will be presented in the talk.

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