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Measures for Tissue Expansion, Contraction, and Circulation

In previous work, authors have reported measuring such quantities as torsion, and rotational motion of the tissue. However, with previous techniques, this information could only be obtained at a specific set of points within the myocardium. With the methods described, we can obtain displacement vectors on all parts of the myocardium. From this information, we obtain differential vector quantities which describe local rotations and expansions.
Tissue Expansion and Contraction
Expansion or contraction of the myocardium in an arbitrary area within the LV wall between the endocardial and epicardial surfaces may be written as:

where the integral on the left is a line integral computed on a curve which bounds the myocardial mass of interest, is the normal to , and is a dense displacement vector field. The integral on the right is over the area bounded by , and is the divergence of the vector field. This provides an easy way to compute a quantitative measure of tissue expansion. The strength of this measure is that it is invariant to rigid body motion, and so can be used as a measure of compressibility, of non-rigid deformation, or of tissue expansion, or contraction.
Circulation
Torsion has been described to be of major significance in the study of LV. We can evaluate circulation accurately around any contour bounding the LV myocardium:

where is a planar contour, is the tangent to such a curve, is the binormal of the curve, and the integral is evaluated around . is the component of curl of perpendicular to the plane of describing infinitesimal circulation of the displacement vector field at a point. It is important to note that this information can be evaluated around any planar contour which passes through the myocardium.


mceachen@
Mon Mar 7 15:28:37 EST 1994