Determining the Volume of the Left Ventricle from Gated Cardiac NuclearMedicine Images

In this project a variety of methods are being tested to find the boundaries of the left ventricle from nuclear medicine measurements. After determining the boundary, the volumeis estimated by integrating the emission signal over the ventricle. Application of this method to a sequence of frames taken over the cardiac cycle allows estimation of the ejection fraction. Status: one version operational, but additional work is being done to make the boundary determination more robust.

In this nuclear medicine image of the heart, the ventricles are visible due to the presence of radioactive isotopes in theblood. Click here to see an animation of the beating heart and the boundaries found by the current algorithm. The image illustrated in the animation was not registered, frame-to-frame, and therefore exhibits jitter. Work is currently under way to correct this

For more information, please contact Dr. Wesley Snyder at wes@eos.ncsu.edu