Fast and Quantitative Analysis of 4D cardiac images using a SMP architecture

In the present research a parallel algorithm for medical image processing has been proposed, which allows 3D quantitative analysis of left ventricular cardiac wall motion in real time. It is a fundamental task in evaluating a lot of indexes useful to perform diagnosis of important diseases. However, such analysis involves expensive tasks in terms of computational time: tridimensional segmentation and an accurate cavity contour detection during the entire cardiac cycle. In this paper an implementation of a dynamic quantitative analysis algorithm on low-cost Shared Memory Processor machine is described. In order to test the developed system in actual environment, a dynamic sequence of 3D data volume, derived from Magnetic Resonance (MR) cardiac images, has been processed.