Feature tracking cardiac magnetic resonance imaging: A review of a novel non-invasive cardiac imaging technique

Abstract

Cardiovascular disease is a leading cause of morbidity and mortality globally. Early diagnostic markers are gaining popularity for better patient care disease outcomes. There is an increasing interest in noninvasive cardiac imaging biomarkers to diagnose subclinical cardiac disease. Feature tracking cardiac magnetic resonance imaging is a novel post-processing technique that is increasingly being employed to assess global and regional myocardial function. This technique has numerous applications in structural and functional diagnostics. It has been validated in multiple studies, although there is still a long way to go for it to become routine standard of care.

Myocardial Strain Analysis using CMR Feature Tracking – The Good, The Bad and The Ugly

“…CMR FT is based on a pattern-matching technique of tracking unique "features" across different images in a cardiac cycle (8). First, the endocardial and epicardial borders are traced at end diastole, the slice representing the end of diastolic filling and the best separation between the blood pool and myocardial tissue.…”

“…While these techniques might be the most accurate non-invasive means of measuring myocardial strain, they require specific acquisition and post-processing, rendering them predominantly as a research tool. CMR FT does not require additional image acquisition for strain analysis as it utilizes the standard steady-state free procession (SSFP) cine images for analysis (8).…”

“…Since SSFP is the routine imaging sequence that has been the corner stone of CMR imaging for more than 20 years, there is a vast availability of data in a variety of diseases for analysis (8). In spite of the differences between the strain values produced by FT software packages and by gold standard techniques such as tagging and DENSE , FT usage will continue to expand in research and clinical settings.…”

“…Over the years, there have been a number of different CMR methods used for assessing strain, including myocardial tagging (MT), displacement encoding with stimulated echoes (DENSE), and most recently, feature tracking (FT) (4). Specifically, CMR FT has emerged as a simple post-processing method for quantifying strain (7). It is becoming the preferred technique in many research and clinical settings for its relative ease in analyzing a large amount of cine data.…”

Cardiac deformation parameters and rotational mechanics by cardiac magnetic resonance feature tracking in pre-adolescent male soccer players

“…3 Therefore, we decided to analyse myocardial deformation and rotational mechanics by a novel cardiac MRI feature-tracking post-processing technique in pre-adolescent soccer players. 4…”