Defining angular and radial positions and parameters for myocardial pixels in cardiac MR images

Abstract

In this work we aimed to automatically produce a measure for the angular and radial position of all pixels within the myocardium in CMR images, left ventricle, short axis view. A reference axis is chosen in an anatomically meaningful way, and this makes the angular position measure easy to relate to the American Heart Association (AHA) 17 segment model. The angular and the radial position give values for each pixel so that each pixel can be represented by a 3D vector of information [intensity value, angular position, radial position]. Using this 3D representation of each pixel, interesting parameters can easily be defined. For example looking at LGE-CMR images for patients with myocardial scar, parameters for describing the localization of the scar segments can be found automatically and objectively, and can be used for further classification of patients.