Left Ventricular Function

Having defined the endo- and epicardial borders at all time points, and set up the segments, the LVFunction tab allows left ventricular function to be assessed.

Select the "LV Function" tab in the Cardiac Segment toolkit:

Cardiac Segment left ventricular function analysis

Then press the Button to do the analysis button. After a few moments, you will see some pop-up graphs (one for every image slice location) showing the myocardial wall thickness in each segment through the cardiac cycle, and a dialog asking whether you want to save the results of the analysis to a report.

Dialog for the Cardiac LV Function analysis

You can:

  • Write to a text file report. A File chooser will appear, for you to choose a log file name. The default file extension for log files is ".log". If the chosen file already exists, an entry will be appended to the log file.
  • Write to a PDF file report. A File chooser will appear, for you to choose a PDF file name. If the chosen file already exists, an entry will be appended to the PDF file.
  • Send a PDF report to a DICOM server. The DICOM server to which it will be sent must already have been set up, and is the current server selected in the DICOM Query/Retrieve tool. See these instructions for how to set up the connection to remote DICOM servers.
  • Save PDF and Send to DICOM. Both save to disk and send to a DICOM server.

If you write a report, as well as the wall thickness values reported in the graphs, it will contain LV function parameters:

  1. End-diastolic volume
  2. End-systolic volume
  3. Stroke volume
  4. Ejection fraction

These are estimated individually at every slice position, and then summed to give a value over all slices.