Steps towards quantification of the cardiological stress exam

In this work we aim to advance the translation of model-based myocardial contractility estimation to the clinical problem of quantitative assessment of the dobutamine stress exam. In particular, we address the question of limited spatial resolution of the observations obtained from cine MRI during the stress test, in which typically only a small number of cine MRI slices are acquired. Due to the relative risk during the dobutamine infusion, a safe acquisition protocol with a healthy volunteer under the infusion of a beta-blocker is applied in order to get a better insight into the contractility estimation using such a type of clinical data. The estimator is compared for three types of observations, namely the processed short axis cine stack contiguously covering the ventricles, the short axis stack limited to only 3 slices and the combination of 3 short and 3 long axis slices. A decrease of contractilities in AHA regions under the beta-blocker infusion was estimated for each observation. The corrected model (by using the estimated parameters) was then compared with the displacements extracted from 3D tagged MRI.