MICCAI 2016 Daily - Wednesday

the time dimension in the process. The main goal of our method is to preserve the time dimension in the resulting MRA data. MICCAI Daily: Do the patients need that? Mariana: It is a technique that is mostly in research right now. There are some clinical applications. We need it because usually what happens when they are analyzing the heart, the doctor looks at an image and assumes what is happening. They can see it 3- dimensionally, but the flow is not there. When you measure the blood flow, you can visualize the blood and what is happening with it. MICCAI Daily: Why do physicians do that? Mariana: To analyze what is happening with specific patients, do nice visualizations, and to look at what is really happening with the flow of blood inside the heart. MICCAI Daily : Is there a reason why physicians are doing it this way and not in a way which is more sophisticated? Mariana: The main limitation in the type of MRI imaging that we do is that the amount of data that comes out of these images is very large. You will have a volume, in 4 dimensions, that is already quite large with a lot of information. It has information through time as well. You have at least 40 time frames of what is happening with the blood flow in each of the time frames. It is a lot of data. The challenge is how do we make this data useful, quickly. We want to make it as automatic as possible or entirely automatic. The idea is that the doctor comes in, looks at this image, and can already extract useful information from it. Not only look at what is happening, but we can also extract the amount of flow that is going through there at a specific time and what is the actual volume of the left ventricle. All of these things require segmentation, analysis of specific areas of the vessels, segmentation of the vessel, analysis of what happened in the flow of the vessels, visualizations, etc. That is what we are trying to do. We’re are trying to make it as automatic as possible so that, in the future, it can be done in the actual clinic and not only in research. MICCAI Daily: In what settings will doctors use this model? Our Pick for Wednesday 5 MICCAI Daily: Wednesday Four-dimensional CardioAngiography (4D PC-MRCA) generated from one 4D Flow MRI dataset at three timeframes of the cardiac cycle. The aorta and pulmonary artery have been segmented in red and blue, respectively .