Automatic quantitative analysis of mitral and tricuspid regurgitations by cine MRI with mathematical morphological image segmentation

MRI is able to display successfully the rapid and turbulent flows like regurgitations in cardiac cavities for clinical examination purposes. This paper presents a new and efficient method to realise automatic evaluation of heart disease with valvular insufficiencies by means of watershed algorithm in mathematical morphology, by which the contours of regurgitant jets and related auricles are fastly and accurately outlined. The best correlations between manual and automated outlining (r=0.94 for MR and 0.89 for TR, p<0.0001) appear in area ratio with the mean of the first 3 largest signal losses to auricle and a good agreement of regurgitation with reference exploration method constituted from echo- and angiography is found. The results indicate therefore the success of the approach proposed.