An innovate automatic heart localization method in cardiac Cine MRI using optical flow

Cardiovascular diseases are the first cause of death in the world. The cardiac MRI has proved its availability in diagnosing different cardiac conditions, evaluating the blood flow to the heart, or evaluating the cardiac function. Localizing the heart position in the cardiac MRI images is an important step before evaluating the heart function. The proposed work intends to develop an automatic localization method of the heart from Cine MRI short-axis view images. This method based on the lucas-kanade optical flow between each two successive frames over the cardiac cycle. Then sum all the magnitudes of motion fields and get the region with the maximum velocity. Since the heart is the most moving organ in the images, then the maximum velocity region is the heart region. The proposed method is tested on a considerable number of patients and it effectively localizes the heart.