Detection of ischemic regions of heart

• Grant number: 13/20244-1
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships in Brazil - Scientific Initiation
• Start date: December 01, 2013
• End date: November 30, 2014
• Field of knowledge: Physical Sciences and Mathematics - Computer Science
• Principal Investigator: Regina Célia Coelho
• Grantee: Salety Ferreira Baracho
• Host Institution: Instituto de Ciência e Tecnologia (ICT). Universidade Federal de São Paulo (UNIFESP). Campus São José dos Campos. São José dos Campos , SP, Brazil

Abstract

There are several works using image processing technics, specially segmentation, to detect infarcted region of the heart, mainly MRI. However, as to teaching as to learning in medical area, it is also important to diagnose the pre-infarction situation by visual inspection. Nevertheless, to obtain human heart images (for instance, photos) in that critically ill situation is impossible in most cases. To overcome this problem, rats have been used in studying of cardiovascular diseases as researches for animal model that can offer new perspectives to protect people from cardiac ischemia. This research project proposes the developing and implementation of image processing technics to segment ischemic areas of rat hearts, as myocardia pre-infarction. This project is part of a major project whose goal is to simulate/animate the cardiac beat, by using an artificial three-dimensional heart, by the analysis to electrocardiogram signals. Addition to the importance of the study itself, the detection of ischemic regions will aid in the simulation of heart beat to be able to show in the heart animation, the size of the ischemic region, if any ischemia detected by analyzing the electrocardiogram signal. In this case, initial studies will be performed in rats, whose characteristics of the signals are similar to the characteristics of ECG signals humans. The project proposed here is related to the segmentation and calculation of the area of the affected region by ischemic.