Left ventricle motion analysis by hierarchical decomposition

An approach to the modeling and analysis of left ventricle motion and deformation is presented. The hierarchical motion model of the left ventricle is constructed by combining several simple models and is able to capture major motion and deformation components that are already confirmed by medical observations. The hierarchical decomposition characterizes the left ventricle motion and deformation in a coarse-to-fine fashion and leads to computationally efficient estimation algorithms. The global rigid motion of the left ventricle is estimated by establishing a time-varying object-centered coordinate system. The global and local deformations of the left ventricle are obtained by fitting the given data to superquadric and spherical harmonic modeling primitives, respectively. The animation of estimation results is consistent with prior knowledge of the left ventricle and therefore shows the success of the hierarchical decomposition based approach.<<ETX>>