UC Berkeley

Cardiovascular disease has remained the leading cause of death worldwide. In addition, the 2015 Annual Data Report from the US Renal Data System shows that sudden cardiac death and arrhythmias are the leading cause of mortality for patients on routine hemodialysis for end-stage renal disease (ESRD). In this study, we aim to augment cardiac magnetic resonance (CMR) images obtained for such patients through a registration framework developed for analyzing two-dimensional (2D) CMR image sequences. The framework consolidates existing tools, such as segmentation and the large deformation diffeomorphic metric mapping (LDDMM) algorithm, and provides a systematic process to define the circumferential and radial directions in general left ventricle geometries, to quantify its myocardial strain throughout the cardiac cycle. While CMR image sequences are used in this work, the framework is designed to be agnostic to the imaging modality. In conjunction with this framework, validation tests were developed using synthetic deformation data generated through solid mechanics simulations. This was done for three analytical shapes: a box, thick-walled cylinder, and a thick-walled ellipsoid, all in three dimensions. This synthetic data was then used to provide a 2D input to the registration framework, which allowed a direct comparison of the deformation computed from the solid mechanics simulation and the registration framework. All of this was developed to use data that is generally readily accessible in clinical settings, as well as to provide a template for designing validation tests for myocardial strain computations.