MOVING TOWARDS A 5D CARDIAC MODEL

Abstract— The medical diagnosis process requires several steps to identify the types of cardiac pathologies. The segmentation step is used to determine the measurements for cardiac abnormalities on the short axis of the 4D acquired in MRI, but this phase remains limited on the blood flow sequences. The MRI modality allow to the experts to quantify the stenosis and the regurgitation of aortic blood flow. The parameters extracted from the flow sequences, after segmentation, make it possible to identify the valvular pathologies, but they are not sufficient to complete the medical prognosis as well as the lack of precision of these measurements. In this paper, we propose to make a coupling between the 4D cardiac cuts with their study of blood flow through the technique of registration and reconstruction. The interest of the purpose of the blood flow as fifth dimension is to improve the accuracy of the cardiac parameters and the extracting of measurements for valvulopathies in the process of assistance to the decision for the experts An example was introduced in this context through the development of cloud services for patient-specific simulations of blood flows through aortic valves as well as an OsiriX software for 5D visualization that combines a 4D sequence and the functional flow dimension. In this framework, we proposed a processing chain to lead towards a 5D solution. Another problem is raised is the choice of the appropriate architecture to solve the problem of hybrid parallelization for the processing of these cardiac images. To test the constraints of time of the concept of 5D, we need a GPU graphics processor acquired in MRI, as well as a CPU processor to perform the complexity of calculation and the operations applied to the algorithms of image processing.