Real-time myocardium segmentation for the assessment of cardiac function variation

Recent developments in MRI enable the acquisition of image sequences with high spatio-temporal resolution. Cardiac motion can be captured without gating and triggering. Image size and contrast relations differ from conventional cardiac MRI cine sequences requiring new adapted analysis methods. We suggest a novel segmentation approach utilizing contrast invariant polar scanning techniques. It has been tested with 20 datasets of arrhythmia patients. The results do not differ significantly more between automatic and manual segmentations than between observers. This indicates that the presented solution could enable clinical applications of real-time MRI for the examination of arrhythmic cardiac motion in the future.