Patent ID: 8301224

Claim:
A computer-implemented method for diagnosing pulmonary hypertension from phase-contrast magnetic resonance (MR) images, the method performed by the computer comprising the steps of: providing a time series of one or more magnetic resonance (MR) flow images of a patient's mediastinum during one or more cardiac cycles, wherein each said flow image for a given time point comprises a plurality of 3-dimensional flow vectors associated with a 3-dimensional grid of points; segmenting the pulmonary artery within each image of the times series of images, and identifying the anterior wall and pulmonary valve within the segmented pulmonary artery; analyzing blood flow during a diastolic phase of said one or more cardiac cycles to determine a relative duration of blood flow, t streamlines , during said diastolic phase, wherein analyzing blood flow to determine t streamlines comprises: selecting an image from said time series of images that is associated with a beginning of a diastolic phase; calculating in said selected image a spatial average of the flow magnitude in a spatial region in a cross section of the pulmonary artery; calculating said spatial average of said flow magnitude in each subsequent image associated with the diastolic phase until an end image is reached wherein said spatial average falls below a predetermined threshold; and determining t streamlines from differences in a time associated with said image associated with the beginning of a diastolic phase and a time associated with said end image; analyzing blood flow during a latter portion of a systolic phase and a subsequent diastolic phase of said one or more cardiac cycles to detect the presence and duration t vortex of a vortex; and diagnosing the presence of pulmonary hypertension from t streamlines and t vortex .