A new approach for analysing motion and deformation of left ventricle: Post‐processing 3D echocardiography data with finite element method

Abstract

In the medical community, it is common practice to examine segmental (regional) values. For instance, echocardiography data are analysed by dividing the left ventricle (LV) endocardial surface into 16 or 17 areas (segments), which actually consist of several nodes (vortices) and the nodal values are averaged over the segments. Although, the averaged segment values provide useful information and are widely used, looking at pointwise values might enable a more extensive LV assessment, which has not been attempted so far. For instance, averaging might be ruling out some unusual localized deformations, which can be only detected through a pointwise distribution. Therefore, in this contribution, we introduce a new methodology to analyse 3D echocardiography data from computational modelling perspective which eventually enables a pointwise distribution of deformation related quantities over the LV endocardial surface. To this end, we export the tracked LV endocardial surface from a dedicated software 4D LV‐analysis Tomtec, which enables to export the current coordinates of the nodes on the surface. The coordinates are then integrated into a finite element analysis program and, eventually, one can compute any deformation related quantity and obtain a pointwise distribution over the endocardial surface. To our best knowledge, such an approach has not been introduced before. In order to demonstrate the usability, we compare the pointwise value distribution to traditional averaged segmental values. Additionally, we calculate the stress distribution and the sphericity index in a pointwise manner, which are not provided by commercial LV analysis softwares.