Quantification of blood flow in great vessels from cardiac magnetic resonance imaging

Abstract

This paper presents a new fool developed to quantify and characterize blood flow in great vessels. The aim is to quantify the flow during the cardiac cycle from sequences of magnetic resonance images of the vessel cross-section. The proposed method tracks the vessel contour to automatically quantify the maximum velocity and flow through the cardiac cycle and finally obtains the instantaneous stroke volume. The techniques proposed are based on active contours coupled with a motion estimation method. Results in ten different sequences from patients and healthy subjects have been obtained, showing values similar to other flow measurement techniques. A repeatability study was done to assess the robustness of the proposed tool.