Purpose

This paper presents CardIAc, an open-source application designed as an alternative to commercial software for left ventricle myocardial strain quantification in short-axis cardiac magnetic resonance images. The aim is to provide a useful extension for myocardial strain analysis that can be easily adapted to incorporate different strategies of motion tracking to improve the strain accuracy. In this way, users with programming skills can easily modify the code and adjust the program’s performance according to their own scientific or clinical requirements. The software is intended for research and clinical use is not advised.

Methods

CardIAc was developed as a 3D Slicer extension for an easy installation and usability. The main contribution of this article is to provide a general workflow, going from data and segmentation loading, 3D heart modeling, analysis and several options for visualization of the myocardial strain.

Results

CardIAc strain feature was evaluated on a public dataset (Cardiac Motion Analysis Challenge—STACOM 2011) of 15 volunteers, and a synthetic one generated from this real dataset. Results on the real dataset show that cardIAc achieves suitable accuracy for myocardial motion estimation with a median error of 3.66 mm. In particular, global strain curves show strong correlation with the bibliography for healthy patients and similar approaches. On the other hand, results on the synthetic dataset show a mean global error of 4.07%, 7.76% and 8.18% for circumferential, radial and longitudinal strain.

Conclusion

This paper introduces a new open-source application for strain analysis distributed under a BSD-style open-source license. Results demonstrate the capability and merits of the proposed application for strain analysis.

中文翻译：

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CardIAc：用于心肌应变分析的开源应用程序

目的

本文介绍CardIAc，这是一种开源应用程序，旨在替代短轴心脏磁共振图像中左心室心肌应变的商业软件。目的是为心肌应变分析提供有用的扩展，它可以轻松地适应各种运动跟踪策略，以提高应变精度。这样，具有编程技能的用户可以根据自己的科学或临床要求轻松修改代码并调整程序的性能。该软件仅供研究使用，不建议临床使用。

方法

CardIAc被开发为3D Slicer扩展，以易于安装和使用。本文的主要贡献是提供一个通用的工作流程，从数据和分段加载，3D心脏建模，分析以及用于可视化心肌应变的多个选项开始。

结果

在由15位志愿者组成的公共数据集（“心脏运动分析挑战赛”，STACOM 2011）上评估了心脏的张力特征，并从该真实数据集生成了一个综合的数据。实际数据集上的结果表明，cardIAc达到了心肌运动估计的合适精度，中位误差为3.66 mm。特别是，总体应变曲线与健康患者和类似方法的参考书目密切相关。另一方面，合成数据集的结果显示，圆周，径向和纵向应变的平均整体误差为4.07％，7.76％和8.18％。

结论

本文介绍了一种新的开放源代码应用程序，该应用程序以BSD样式的开放源代码许可分发。结果证明了所提出的用于应变分析的应用的能力和优点。