Patent ID: 8577441

Claim:
A computer implemented method for real time monitoring of cardiac function, the method performed by the computer comprising the steps of: selecting a plane through a heart from which to acquire heart function data; locating a center of a chamber of said heart; acquiring a sequence of 2D magnetic resonance (MR) images from said plane over one or more cardiac cycles with a time resolution at least one order of magnitude less than the cardiac rate, wherein each of said images comprises a plurality of intensities defined on a domain of points on a 2D grid; projecting a plurality of beams from said chamber center through each MR image as each MR image is acquired, each beam comprising a substantially collinear subset of points in said image; sampling image intensities along periodically spaced points of each beam in each MR image; obtaining image intensity in real-time as a function of time at corresponding beam points across the acquired MR images, wherein a time resolution of the image intensity function is at least that of the sequence of the 2D MR images; detecting endocardial contours from said image intensity functions sampled at periodically spaced points of each of the plurality of beams in each MR image; calculating distances between said detected endocardial contours, wherein the maximum distances as a function of time in each projection beam are taken as the end-diastolic (ED) diameter, and the minimum distances are taken as the end-systolic (ES) diameter; and using said image intensity time function along each said beam to detect changes in values of a physiological parameter over time.