Cardiac motion estimation using a spatiotemporal-frequency approach

The complex deformation that occurs during the contraction and relaxation of the left ventricle (LV) has forced investigators to make major simplifying assumptions to interpret LV motion. It is frequent to model the LV as some particular shape or assume symmetry, such as the elliptical chamber, in order to study ventricular changes of shape. The proper quantification of the cardiac motion still remains an open and challenging research problem. In the paper we describe a method for motion detection based on a spatiotemporal-frequency approach. This method has been applied to compute the optical flow field obtained from a series of gated-SPECT images. Optical flow is a dense velocity vector field that represents the motion of brightness patterns between successive image frames. It has been widely used in computer vision to provide important cues for image and vision analysis.