Following on from the CardioMeter project dedicated to the quantitative analysis of heart function in tagged MRI, the CardioPerf project,
conducted in partnership with Philips Medical Systems, focuses on measuring myocardial perfusion in MRI, with a view to a joint analysis of perfusion/contraction.
Research work in 2005 related to the development and preliminary clinical validation of an unsupervised methodology for the quantitative
analysis of perfusion MRI examinations, enabling first pass graphs to be computed automatically for each myocardial segment. This approach is based on the extraction of a cardiac region of interest by mathematical morphology, the compensation of
cardio-respiratory artifacts by region-based nonrigid statistical registration, and the dynamic segmentation of the heart during transit of a contrast agent via a new class of statistical active contours (info-snakes).
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