Model-driven physiological assessment of the mitral valve from 4D TEE

Disorders of the mitral valve are second most frequent, cumulating 14 percent of total number of deaths caused by Valvular Heart Disease each year in the United States and require elaborate clinical management. Visual and quantitative evaluation of the valve is an important step in the clinical workflow according to experts as knowledge about mitral morphology and dynamics is crucial for interventional planning. Traditionally this involves examination and metric analysis of 2D images comprising potential errors being intrinsic to the method. Recent commercial solutions are limited to specific anatomic components, pathologies and a single phase of cardiac 4D acquisitions only. This paper introduces a novel approach for morphological and functional quantification of the mitral valve based on a 4D model estimated from ultrasound data. A physiological model of the mitral valve, covering the complete anatomy and eventual shape variations, is generated utilizing parametric spline surfaces constrained by topological and geometrical prior knowledge. The 4D model's parameters are estimated for each patient using the latest discriminative learning and incremental searching techniques. Precise evaluation of the anatomy using model-based dynamic measurements and advanced visualization are enabled through the proposed approach in a reliable, repeatable and reproducible manner. The efficiency and accuracy of the method is demonstrated through experiments and an initial validation based on clinical research results. To the best of our knowledge this is the first time such a patient specific 4D mitral valve model is proposed, covering all of the relevant anatomies and enabling to model the common pathologies at once.