3D motion tracking of the heart using Harmonic Phase (HARP) isosurfaces

Tags are non-invasive features induced in the heart muscle that enable the tracking of heart motion. Each tag line, in fact, corresponds to a 3D tag surface that deforms with the heart muscle during the cardiac cycle. Tracking of tag surfaces deformation is useful for the analysis of left ventricular motion. Cardiac material markers (Kerwin et al, MIA, 1997) can be obtained from the intersections of orthogonal surfaces which can be reconstructed from short- and long-axis tagged images. The proposed method uses Harmonic Phase (HARP) method for tracking tag lines corresponding to a specific harmonic phase value and then the reconstruction of grid tag surfaces is achieved by a Delaunay triangulation-based interpolation for sparse tag points. Having three different tag orientations from short- and long-axis images, the proposed method showed the deformation of 3D tag surfaces during the cardiac cycle. Previous work on tag surface reconstruction was restricted for the "dark" tag lines; however, the use of HARP as proposed enables the reconstruction of isosurfaces based on their harmonic phase values. The use of HARP, also, provides a fast and accurate way for tag lines identification and tracking, and hence, generating the surfaces. © 2010 Copyright SPIE - The International Society for Optical Engineering.