University of Houston
Department of Computer Science

In partial fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of
Doctor of Philosophy


Amol S. Pednekar
will defend his thesis

Cardiac Image Analysis: Morphology, Function and Dynamics



Abstract

Cardiovascular disease (CVD) is a leading cause of death world-wide. Substantial research effort has been focused on the improvement of the cardiovascular imaging modalities and the development of computer-assisted image analysis methods to aid in clinical diagnosis and monitoring of CVD. However, the achieved increase in spatio-temporal resolution renders the analysis of the image data as a formidable task.

In this thesis, we present the computational framework for: (1) automatic segmentation of the left ventricular muscle (LV) in cardiac MR images and computation of global (ejection fraction) and local (wall thickness) functional parameters, and (2) motion estimation of the left anterior descending coronary artery. Our work combines the adaptive fuzzy connectedness-based region segmentation approach with energy-minimizing dynamic programming, and the elastically adaptive physics-based deformable model frameworks. Comparative experimental results are presented to highlight the potential of our approach.

Date: Tuesday, December 2, 2003
Time: 11:00 AM
Place: 550-PGH

Faculty, students, and the general public are invited.
Thesis Advisor: Dr. Kakadiaris