A Spatial-Temporal Frequency Approach to Estimate Cardiac Motion

The estimation of left ventricle motion and deformation from series of images has been an area of attention in the medical image analysis and still remains an open and challenging research problem. The proper tracking of left ventricle wall can contribute to isolate the location and extent of ischemic or infarcted myocardium. This work describes a method to automatically estimate the displacement fields for a beating heart based on the study of the variation in the frequency content of a non-stationary image as time varies. Results obtained with this automated method in synthetic images are compared with traditional gradient based method. Furthermore, experiments involving cardiac SPECT images are also presented.