Patent ID: 8204289

Claim:
A system for identifying a particular image associated with a particular cardiac characteristic from within a sequence of cardiac images including image noise artifacts and obtained over a heart beat cycle, comprising: at least one processing device including, at least one non-transitory computer readable storage medium including, first data comprising heart cycle information derived from ECG data, second data comprising data representing a plurality of images acquired over at least one heart cycle and third data comprising data associated with timing of substantially X-ray opaque contrast agent flow, which enhancing visualization of heart ventricle variation and enabling identification of a heart image acquired during a particular cardiac cycle exhibiting substantially optimum image contrast due to the X-ray opaque contrast agent flow; an image data processor for automatically identifying a particular image exhibiting a particular cardiac characteristic from within a sequence of cardiac images by processing the first, second and third data to identify an image having a substantially maximum likelihood of exhibiting said particular cardiac characteristic at a particular cardiac cycle phase and with substantially optimum image contrast; and a storage processor for retrieving data representing said particular image from a storage device.