Learning associations between clinical information and motion-based descriptors using a large scale MR-derived cardiac motion atlas

TL;DR

This study develops a large-scale cardiac motion atlas from UK Biobank MRI data, using automated quality control and data-driven descriptors to link cardiac motion with health factors, outperforming traditional measures.

Contribution

It introduces a novel framework combining cardiac motion atlases, automated quality control, and data-driven descriptors to analyze associations with health variables.

Findings

Positive correlation between motion descriptors and health factors like body fat and hypertension.

Outperforms ejection fraction in detecting cardiac function changes.

Provides a scalable framework for cardiac health investigation.

Abstract

The availability of large scale databases containing imaging and non-imaging data, such as the UK Biobank, represents an opportunity to improve our understanding of healthy and diseased bodily function. Cardiac motion atlases provide a space of reference in which the motion fields of a cohort of subjects can be directly compared. In this work, a cardiac motion atlas is built from cine MR data from the UK Biobank (~ 6000 subjects). Two automated quality control strategies are proposed to reject subjects with insufficient image quality. Based on the atlas, three dimensionality reduction algorithms are evaluated to learn data-driven cardiac motion descriptors, and statistical methods used to study the association between these descriptors and non-imaging data. Results show a positive correlation between the atlas motion descriptors and body fat percentage, basal metabolic rate, hypertension, smoking status and alcohol intake frequency. The proposed method outperforms the ability to identify changes in cardiac function due to these known cardiovascular risk factors compared to ejection fraction, the most commonly used descriptor of cardiac function. In conclusion, this work represents a framework for further investigation of the factors influencing cardiac health.