4D Multi object segmentation based on MR image sequences - Medical application for evaluation of myocardial differences in shape and function after infarction

• Applicant: Dr. Jan Ehrhardt
• Subject Area: Epidemiology and Medical Biometry/Statistics
• Term: from 2014 to 2021
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 263745607

Myocardial infarction (MI) is the leading cause of death for both men and women worldwide in the western civilization. The quality of life and the course of disease for MI patients depend on the revitalization of the myocardium and avoiding the development of a persistent dysfunctional contraction of the heart, which can lead to progressive impairment of the heart function combined with cardiac remodeling. Early detection of patients with risk of remodeling is clinical relevant because effective therapies have to be initiated early to avoid remodeling.The aim of this work is to develop new automatic methods for detection, quantification and prediction of myocardial remodeling based on spatio temporal MRI datasets. Therefore, a new workflow has to be developed that enables automatic pre-processing of the datasets, a model based segmentation and motion field estimation in 4D MRI as well as quantitative parameter extraction, analysis and visualization. For development and evaluation a comprehensive data pool of baseline and follow-up MRI dataset of MI patients exists. All datasets were acquired with standard imaging parameters. MRI data of healthy subjects with high temporal and/or spatial resolution exists as well. Overall more than 360 anonymized MRI datasets are available for this project. They contain multiple MRI sequences (e.g. Cine-MRI, LGE-MRI, T2w-MRI) and manual segmentations of the relevant cardiac structures.A central aspect of this work is the development of a model based approach. This method uses a new integrated segmentation and motion estimation of the left and right ventricle approach and considers knowledge about shape and shape variations as well as the typical motion of the heart. Another aspect is the quantitative analysis and classification of clinical MRI datasets. Here, learning based classification algorithms are used. Therefore, relevant parameters characterizing shape and motion of the heart are extracted and analyzed providing an automatic detection and prognosis of myocardial remodeling.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants
• Participating Persons: Professor Dr. Gerhard Adam; Professor Dr. Karl Wegscheider