The emerging role of magnetic resonance imaging and multidetector computed tomography in the diagnosis of dilated cardiomyopathy

Magnetic resonance imaging and multidetector computed tomography are new imaging methods that have much to offer clinicians caring for patients with dilated cardiomyopathy. In this article we briefly describe the clinical, pathophysiological and histological aspects of dilated cardiomyopathy. Then we discuss in detail the use of both imaging methods for measurement of chamber size, global and regional function, for myocardial tissue characterisation, including myocardial viability assessment, and determination of arrhythmogenic substrate, and their emerging role in cardiac resynchronisation therapy

Accurate Left Ventricular Segmentation Based on Morphological Watershed Transformation Towards 3D Visualization

International audienceThe current challenge for image treatment, targeting the heart ventricles (LV and RV), consists on ensuring an accurate automatic segmentation aiming to identify the myocardial contours. In this paper we propose an automatic watershed-based segmentation of the left ventricle (LV)based on topology, geometry and brightness priors. We attempted to demonstrate the accuracy of our proposed approach by comparing it with other manual segmentations carried out by two clinical experts, on 20 patients. In the aim of obtaining an accurate 3D reconstruction, we propose the volumetric object reconstruction method using The Visualization Toolkit VTK .Furthermore, the 3D+t assessment is used for the examination of the dynamic behavior of the LV to reveal regions of myocardial dysfunction