High-resolution 3D Maps of Left Atrial Displacements using an Unsupervised Image Registration Neural Network
This provides a tool for clinicians to better diagnose cardiovascular diseases by enabling detailed 3D analysis of left atrial deformations, though it is incremental as it applies existing unsupervised image registration methods to a new medical imaging domain.
The paper tackled the lack of automated tools for analyzing left atrial motion in 3D from high-resolution MRI by developing a pipeline that segments the left atrium and extracts displacement fields, achieving an average Hausdorff distance of 2.51 ± 1.3 mm and Dice score of 0.96 ± 0.02.
Functional analysis of the left atrium (LA) plays an increasingly important role in the prognosis and diagnosis of cardiovascular diseases. Echocardiography-based measurements of LA dimensions and strains are useful biomarkers, but they provide an incomplete picture of atrial deformations. High-resolution dynamic magnetic resonance images (Cine MRI) offer the opportunity to examine LA motion and deformation in 3D, at higher spatial resolution and with full LA coverage. However, there are no dedicated tools to automatically characterise LA motion in 3D. Thus, we propose a tool that automatically segments the LA and extracts the displacement fields across the cardiac cycle. The pipeline is able to accurately track the LA wall across the cardiac cycle with an average Hausdorff distance of $2.51 \pm 1.3~mm$ and Dice score of $0.96 \pm 0.02$.