Glyph-Based Visualization of Myocardial Perfusion Data and Enhancement with Contractility and Viability Information

Abstract

Perfusion data characterize the regional blood flow in human tissue. In the diagnosis of the Coronary Heart Disease, they are acquired to detect hypoperfused regions of the myocardium (heart muscle) at an early stage or to evaluate the hemodynamical relevance of a known pathologic vessel narrowing. For each voxel in the data, a time-intensity curve describes the enhancement of a contrast agent. Parameters derived from these curves characterize the regional perfusion and have to be integrated for diagnosis. The diagnostic evaluation of this multi-field data is challenging and time-consuming due to its complexity. We tackle this problem by developing a glyph-based integrated visualization of perfusion parameters in 3D-space with the patient-individual ventricular anatomy as context information. Besides the assessment of myocardial perfusion, current cardiac imaging technology allows for the investigation of myocardial contractility as well as for the detection of non-viable tissue. The combined inspection of these data supports diagnosis finding and therapy planning by allowing for the discrimination of healthy, hypoperfused and non-viable tissue as well as between non-viable and temporarily inactive tissue. To facilitate such an inspection, we apply registration methods that cope with differences in orientation and coverage between these three datasets. We enhance the glyph-based visualization of perfusion parameters by integrating parameters describing the myocardial contractility and viability.