AHA conform analysis of myocardial function using and extending the toolkits ITK and VTK

Modern dynamic image acquisition techniques allow for a non-invasive imaging of the beating heart. Thus, ischemic areas of the heart's wall can be detected by anlyzing the left ventricular myocardial function. For a standardization of that task the American Heart Association (AHA) has published recommendations for the myocardial segmentation and nomenclature. We propose in this paper a comprehensive, fully automatic, and AHA conform analysis of the myocardial function that is based on the segmentation results of the left ventricular cavity for the whole cardiac cycle. The physical values wall motion, ejection fraction, and wall thickening are computed and visualized employing and extending the toolkits ITK and VTK. First test results using dynamic MRI data are presented.