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Background

Left ventricle (LV) function parameters such as stroke volume and ejection fraction (EF) are vital physiological parameters in the management of heart diseases. In cardiac MR, these parameters are currently derived from multiple short-axial cine images acquired under breath hold, which requires extensive scan planning and patient cooperation. The post-processing workflow is also labor-intensive as a human operator is required to manually trace the endocardium border on every slice. Also, the calculated LV volume may be inaccurate due to low resolution in slice direction and slice mismatch from inconsistent breath hold positions. In this work, we propose to combine a recently developed free-breathing 4D MRI technique and atlas-based image segmentation to calculate the LV function parameters fully automatically.

Methods

MR data were collected with a self-gated, contrast-enhanced, spoiled …