Regional heart motion abnormality detection: An information theoretic approach

• Published in: Medical image analysis Vol. 17; no. 3; pp. 311 - 324
• Main Authors: Punithakumar, Kumaradevan, Ben Ayed, Ismail, Islam, Ali, Goela, Aashish, Ross, Ian G., Chong, Jaron, Li, Shuo
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Netherlands Elsevier B.V 01.04.2013
• Subjects: Algorithms; Cardiac motion estimation; Female; Humans; Image Enhancement - methods; Image Interpretation, Computer-Assisted - methods; Information Storage and Retrieval - methods; Information theoretic measures; Magnetic resonance imaging; Magnetic Resonance Imaging, Cine - methods; Male; Middle Aged; Movement; Myocardial Contraction; Nonlinear state estimation; Pattern Recognition, Automated - methods; Regional wall motion abnormality detection; Reproducibility of Results; Sensitivity and Specificity; Ventricular Dysfunction, Left - diagnosis; Ventricular Dysfunction, Left - physiopathology; Information theoretic measures; Regional wall motion abnormality detection; Cardiac motion estimation; Nonlinear state estimation; Magnetic resonance imaging
• ISSN: 1361-8415; 1361-8423; 1361-8423
• DOI: 10.1016/j.media.2012.11.007

[Display omitted] ► Coronary heart disease can be detected by measuring left ventricular motion. ► Clinically, the wall regional motion is scored following the standard by the AHA. ► Given noisy data and model, an unscented Kalman smoother estimates myocardial points. ► The Shannon’s differential entropy provides the whole distribution information. Tracking regional heart motion and detecting the corresponding abnormalities play an essential role in the diagnosis of cardiovascular diseases. Based on functional images, which are subject to noise and segmentation/registration inaccuracies, regional heart motion analysis is acknowledged as a difficult problem and, therefore, incorporation of prior knowledge is desirable to enhance accuracy. Given noisy data and a nonlinear dynamic model to describe myocardial motion, an unscented Kalman smoother is proposed in this study to estimate the myocardial points. Due to the similarity between the statistical information of normal and abnormal heart motions, detecting and classifying abnormality is a challenging problem. We use the Shannon’s differential entropy of the distributions of potential classifier features to detect and locate regional heart motion abnormality. A naive Bayes classifier algorithm is constructed from the Shannon’s differential entropy of different features to automatically detect abnormal functional regions of the myocardium. Using 174 segmented short-axis magnetic resonance cines obtained from 58 subjects (21 normal and 37 abnormal), the proposed method is quantitatively evaluated by comparison with ground truth classifications by radiologists over 928 myocardial segments. The proposed method performed significantly better than other recent methods, and yielded an accuracy of 86.5% (base), 89.4% (mid-cavity) and 84.5% (apex). The overall classification accuracy was 87.1%. Furthermore, standard kappa statistic comparisons between the proposed method and visual wall motion scoring by radiologists showed that the proposed algorithm can yield a kappa measure of 0.73.