Computation and visualization of asynchronous behavior of the heart

Nowadays, computer-aided diagnosis is widely used in the analysis of cardiac image data. Especially, for the investigation of the dynamic behavior of the heart, automated analysis tools for 4D data sets have been developed. A small set of descriptors of the heart's dynamics are established and used in the clinical routine. However, there exists a whole lot more of such parameters that can be extracted by analyzing 4D data sets. But, many of them are not used due to several reasons: time-consuming computation, no intuitive meaning, little clinical relevance, etc.. In this work we propose a novel descriptor for the dynamic behavior of the heart that can easily be computed from 4D data sets. It describes to which extent the heart exhibits an asynchronous movement. This novel descriptor ASYNCHRONISM is based on the already established measures WALL MOTION and WALL THICKENING, but reveals new, valuable information that is not available when relying only upon the two aforementioned parameters. The ASYNCHRONISM has an intuitive meaning, since it corresponds to the clinical classification scheme of wall motion abnormalities. Beyond its computation we present in this work also methods for its visualization as well as first preliminary results for 4D cardiac magnetic resonance image data.