Wigner-Ville distribution applied to cardiac motion estimation

Some heart abnormalities like ischemia and infarction of myocardium can produce significant changes in cardiac wall motion and decrease severely the cardiac function. For this reason the cardiac motion estimation and quantification have been the focus of many investigations. The aim of this work is to study cardiac motion by means a dense velocity vector field based on the computation of the Wigner-Ville distribution, a common transformation used in the spatiotemporal-frequency (STF) analysis. The major motivation for considering the use of STF comes from observations in mammalian vision This paper describes a method to obtain a 3D-frequency spectrum, based on the computation of the Wigner-Ville distribution and a procedure to determine, automatically, the velocity of pixels in a temporal series of images. The method is also applied to synthetic images and real images obtained from gated-SPECT.