Patent ID: 7603154

Claim:
A method of determining total left ventricular (LV) interior volume during a plurality of phases of a cardiac cycle, said method comprising: acquiring a series of cardiac cine images with an imaging device for imaging interior portions of a mammal body including an end-diastole cardiac image at an end-diastole (ED) phase of the cardiac cycle and at least a second cardiac image at a second phase of the cardiac cycle, the second phase being different from the end-diastole phase; delineating at least one of endocardial and epicardial contours of a left ventricle (LV) in the end-diastole cardiac image calculating an end-diastole interior volume of the left ventricle (LV) in the end-diastole (ED) phase; calculating an end-diastole phase intensity value (I T,ED ) inside the at least one of the endocardial and epicardial contours of the end-diastole cardiac image; applying the at least one of the endocardial and epicardial contours delineated for the end-diastole (cardiac) image to the second cardiac image; calculating a second phase intensity value for a region of the second cardiac image inside at least one of the end-diastole phase and endocardial contours applied to the second cardiac image; calculating a left ventricular interior volume in the second cardiac phase by weighting the end-diastole interior volume in accordance with a ratio of the second phase intensity value and the end-diastole phase (I T,ED ) intensity value; and at least one of storing the left ventricular (LV) interior volume in computer memory and displaying the end-diastole and second cardiac images.