Assessment of a model for overall left ventricular three-dimensional motion from MRI data.

In this paper we present a complete methodology to evaluate a model for overall three-dimensional (3D) motion of the human left ventricle (LV) from MRI data. The left ventricular motion is approximated by a linear model associated with an affine transformation to determine parameters for non-rigid motion of the LV. The proposed method has been applied to a normal patient and to a patient with cardiac disease. Results obtained show that the linear model provides a fairly good approximation of normal left ventricular motion, whereas serious cardiac disease produces abnormal motion, yielding altered model performances.