Parametric Methods for the Regional Assessment of Cardiac Wall Motion Abnormalities: Comparison Study

Left ventricular (LV) dysfunction is mainly assessed by global contractile indices such as ejection fraction and LV Volumes in cardiac MRI. While these indices give information about the presence or not of LV alteration, they are not able to identify the location and the size of such alteration. The aim of this study is to compare the performance of three parametric imaging techniques used in cardiac MRI for the regional quantification of cardiac dysfunction. The proposed approaches were evaluated on 20 patients with myocardial infarction and 20 subjects with normal function. Three parametric images approaches: covariance analysis, parametric images based on Hilbert transform and those based on the monogenic signal were evaluated using cine-MRI frames acquired in three planes of views. The results show that parametric images generated from the monogenic signal were superior in term of sensitivity (89.69%), specificity (86.51%) and accuracy (89.06%) to those based on covariance analysis and Hilbert transform in the detection of contractile dysfunction related to myocardial infarction. Therefore, the parametric image based on the monogenic signal is likely to provide additional regional indices about LV dysfunction and it may be used in clinical practice as a tool for the analysis of the myocardial alterations.