A Framework for the Generation of Realistic Synthetic Cardiac Ultrasound and Magnetic Resonance Imaging Sequences from the same Virtual Patients

Abstract

The use of synthetic sequences is one of the most promising tools for advanced in silico evaluation of the quantification of cardiac deformation and strain through 3D ultrasound (US) and magnetic resonance (MR) imaging. In this paper, we propose the first simulation framework which allows the generation of realistic 3D synthetic cardiac US and MR (both cine and tagging) image sequences from the same virtual patient. A state-of-the-art electromechanical (E/M) model was exploited for simulating groundtruth cardiac motion fields ranging from healthy to various pathological cases including both ventricular dyssynchrony and myocardial ischemia. The E/M groundtruth along with template MR/US images and physical simulators were combined in a unified framework for generating synthetic data. We efficiently merged several warping strategies to keep full control of myocardial deformations while preserving realistic image texture.

Existing System

3d speckle tracking algorithm.

Proposed System

In this paper, we developed a generic pipeline for simulating 3D synthetic cardiac cine MR, tagged MR and US image sequences. The groundtruth cardiac motion fields were generated by an electro-mechanical model. Template acquisitions were deformed into the simulation space by a novel warping technique which ensures that i) motion in the synthetic images matches the E/M model and ii) transitions at the myocardium/background interface are smooth. Both MR and US images were generated by relevant physical simulators. We analyzed the image properties both qualitatively and quantitatively.

Architecture

BLOCK DIAGRAM