Murine Spatiotemporal Cardiac Segmentation
A promising frontier in the further understanding of cardiac dysfunction is the study of intra-myocardial mechanics, probing parameters such as myocardial strain, twist, and torsion. Techniques such as displacement encoding with stimulated echoes (DENSE) in cardiac magnetic resonance (cMR) imaging and speckle tracking in echocardiography (STE) are already providing quantitative measurements of myocardial function in a safe and non-invasive manner. However, extracting meaningful myocardial motion from the acquired imagery remains a tedious, time-consuming, and highly variable process. This research develops an automated method to recover myocardial tissue motion from murine DENSE cMR imagery. On average, the proposed automated technique is able to obtain a root mean squared error of less than a pixel when compared to semi-automatic methods.