Dynamic assessment of cardiac functions by means of cardiac ultrasound elastography

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Early detection of cardiovascular diseases has long become a very active and important research area in medical imaging. In particular, there exists evidence that many critical cardiac disorders can be successfully determined through characterization of the regional cardiac function. For this reason, there has been ever increasing interest in cardiac elastography as a relatively new and very promising technique for analyzing and visualizing the local and global mechanical functions of the heart.Unfortunately, the current progress of cardiac elastography seems to have been hampered by the absence of bona fide methods for estimating the local strains (and/or their rates) of the cardiac muscle. Among the main reasons for which the existing estimation methods fall short to provide reliable results are: 1) non-optimality of the tools used for enhancing the cardiac images and 2) non-optimality of the models used to describe the dynamics of a living heart.The proposed research program is aimed at developing a qualitatively new system for cardiac elastography. The objectives of the program include:1) Development of computationally efficient, robust and accurate preprocessing algorithms for enhancement of cardiac images;2) Development of efficient and reliable methods for estimating the cardiac dynamics from the preprocessed sequences of cardiac images;3) Establishment of the most relevant criteria for automatic discrimination between normal and abnormal regions of the cardiac muscle;4) Exploration of the role of cardiac elastography in the detection of ischemia and infarction via simulations, phantom-based experiments and in vivo study.5) Development of a package of procedures for implementing the method on commercial scanners.