Publication: Quantitative assessment of full field displacement images to analyze functions of the human heart during heart surgery

Our latest work on quantitative assessment of full field displacement images can be used for identifying differences in the behavior and function of the human heart during open heart surgery.

Have you ever looked at two very similar images and though how much different they really are? It is often very easy to qualitatively describe that two or more images are not different or some are more different than others, but how much exactly different they are from each other is difficult to assess. This is very typical in materials engineering as well, where the full field DIC measurements are compared to FEM simulations. It is often clear that the figures are similar, but not necessarily identical. In heart surgery the full field images can also look similar, but it may be critically important to quantify the exact differences between the several images. If for example one compares the behavior of the heart before and after a medical intervention (e.g. medicine bolus) it is important to quantify the effects. For this purpose we have decomposed the full field displacement images into shape descriptor vectors. Each image can be presented as an n-dimensional vector, and the difference between two images can be described quantitatively by the Euclidian distance of the two image descriptor vectors. Our latest article describes this approach and its use in heart surgery.