Peter Weale1, Christoph Guetter2,
Jeremy D. Collins3, Marie Wasielewski3, Neil Chatterjee4,
Marie-Pierre Jolly2, Hui Xue2, Lu Xiaoguang2,
Jens Guehring5, Sven Zuehlsdorff1, James Carr3
1Cardiovascular MR Research
& Development, Siemens Healthcare USA, Chicago, IL, United States; 2Siemens
Corporate Research, Princeton, NJ, United States; 3Radiology, Northwestern
University, Chicago, IL, United States; 4Feinberg School of
Medicine, Northwestern University, Chicago, IL, United States; 5Magnetic
Resonance, Siemens AG, Healthcare Sector, Erlangen, Germany
Tissue Doppler Imaging is an increasingly important echo-cardiographic method whereby mitral annulus velocity parameters such as early diastolic relaxation (e prime) and motion due to atrial contraction (a prime) are used in the assessment of diastolic function. A novel use of a fully automated feature tracking algorithm to identify and track the mitral annulus on conventional four-chamber cine MR images of the heart and subsequently to extract the mitral annular velocity from which the corresponding e-prime values are derived is described.