A Hybrid Approach for Cardiac Blood Flow Vortex Ring Identification Based on Optical Flow and Lagrangian Averaged Vorticity Deviation

Objective: The measurement of cardiac blood flow vortex characteristics can help to facilitate the analysis of blood flow dynamics that regulates heart function. However, the complexity of cardiac flow along with other physical limitations makes it difficult to adequately identify the dominant vortices in a heart chamber, which play a significant role in regulating the heart function. Although the existing vortex quantification methods can achieve this goal, there are still some shortcomings: such as low precision, and ignoring the center of the vortex without the description of vortex deformation processes. To address these problems, an optical flow Lagrangian averaged vorticity deviation (Optical flow-LAVD) method is proposed. Methodology: We examined the flow within the right atrium (RA) of the participants’ hearts, by using a single set of scans pertaining to a slice at two-chamber short-axis orientation. Toward adequate extraction of the vortex ring characteristics, a novel approach driven by the Lagrangian averaged vorticity deviation (LAVD) was implemented and applied to characterize the trajectory integral associated with vorticity deviation and the spatial mean of rings, by using phase-contrast magnetic resonance imaging (PC-MRI) datasets as a case study. To interpolate the time frames between every larger discrete frame and minimize the error caused by constructing a continuous velocity field for the integral process of LAVD, we implemented the optical flow as an interpolator and introduced the backward warping as an intermediate frame synthesis basis, which is then used to generate higher quality continuous velocity fields. Results: Our analytical study results showed that the proposed Optical flow-LAVD method can accurately identify vortex ring and continuous velocity fields, based on optical flow information, for yielding high reconstruction outcomes. Compared with the linear interpolation and phased-based frame interpolation methods, our proposed algorithm can generate more accurate synthesized PC-MRI. Conclusion: This study has developed a novel Optical flow-LAVD model to accurately identify cardiac vortex rings, and minimize the associated errors caused by the construction of a continuous velocity field. Our paper presents a superior vortex characteristics detection method that may potentially aid the understanding of medical experts on the dynamics of blood flow within the heart.