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.

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 animationof the beating heart and theboundaries found by the current algorithmThe image illustrated in the animation was not registered, frame-to-frame,and therefore exhibits jitter. If you would like to read more about this, go to the publications part of the imaging web page, and look up the paper by X. Dai.