In-silico heart model phantom to validate cardiac strain imaging

Tanmay Mukherjee, Muhammad Usman, Rana Raza Mehdi, Emilio Mendiola, Jacques Ohayon , Diana Lindquist, Dipan J. Shah, Sakthivel Sadayappan, Roderic I. Pettigrew, Reza Avazmohammadi

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

1 Scopus citations

Abstract

The quantification of cardiac strains as structural indices of cardiac function has a growing prevalence in clinical diagnosis. However, the highly heterogeneous four-dimensional (4D) cardiac motion challenges accurate “regional” strain quantification and leads to sizable differences in the estimated strains depending on the imaging modality and post-processing algorithm, limiting the translational potential of strains as incremental biomarkers of cardiac dysfunction. There remains a crucial need for a feasible benchmark that successfully replicates complex 4D cardiac kinematics to determine the reliability of strain calculation algorithms. In this study, we propose an in-silico heart phantom derived from finite element (FE) simulations to validate the quantification of 4D regional strains. First, as a proof-of-concept exercise, we created synthetic magnetic resonance (MR) images for a hollow thick-walled cylinder under pure torsion with an exact solution and demonstrated that “ground-truth” values can be recovered for the twist angle, which is also a key kinematic index in the heart. Next, we used mouse-specific FE simulations of cardiac kinematics to synthesize dynamic MR images by sampling various sectional planes of the left ventricle (LV). Strains were calculated using our recently developed non-rigid image registration (NRIR) framework in both problems. Moreover, we studied the effects of image quality on distorting regional strain calculations by conducting in-silico experiments for various LV configurations. Our studies offer a rigorous and feasible tool to standardize regional strain calculations to improve their clinical impact as incremental biomarkers.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Article number109065
Pages (from-to)109065
JournalComputers in Biology and Medicine
Volume181
DOIs
StatePublished - Oct 2024

Keywords

  • Finite element simulations
  • Four-dimensional regional strain calculations
  • In-silico heart phantom
  • Kinematic benchmark
  • Validation
  • Models, Cardiovascular
  • Humans
  • Magnetic Resonance Imaging/methods
  • Heart/diagnostic imaging
  • Animals
  • Algorithms
  • Computer Simulation
  • Finite Element Analysis
  • Mice
  • Phantoms, Imaging

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Health Informatics
  • Computer Science Applications

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