Ming Li1,
2, Bharath Ambale Venkatesh3, Himanshu Gupta4,
Steve G. Lloyd4, Louis J. Dell'Italia4, Thomas Stewart
Denney Jr1, 2
1AU
MRI Research Center, Auburn University, Auburn, AL, United States; 2Electrical
and Computer Engineering Department, Auburn University, Auburn, AL, United
States; 3Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD, United States; 4Department
of Medicine, Division of Cardiovascular Disease, University of Alabama at
Birmingham, Birmingham, AL, United States
Myocardial strain from tagged magnetic resonance imaging is an important parameter of cardiac mechanical function. In previous work, three-dimensional biventricular strain throughout cardiac cycle was reconstructed using displacement measurements obtained by unwrapping harmonic phase. Ideally, multiples of 2 can be added to regions to unwrap a phase image, but noise and artifacts can create inconsistencies in the phase and cause unwrapping methods to fail. Previous work used manually-placed branch cuts to resolve these inconsistencies. In this abstract, we present an algorithm to automatically place branch cuts in both long and short axis tagged cardiac images and compute 3D+time biventricular strain.