@inproceedings{eprints829, title = {Visualizing and quantifying myocardial oxygenation changes with statistically optimal colormaps}, booktitle = {17th Meeting of the international society for magnetic resonance in medicine}, year = {2009}, author = {Sotirios A. Tsaftaris and Richard Tang and Rachel Klein and Debiao Li and Rohan Dharmakumar}, abstract = {Blood-oxygen-level dependent (BOLD) MRI may be used for detecting myocardial oxygenation (MO) changes secondary to coronary artery stenosis. Under pharmacological stress, areas of the myocardium supplied by a stenotic coronary artery are hypointense relative to healthy regions. Visualizing these changes requires manual windowing. In this paper a method for automatic visualization and quantification of myocardial signal changes reflecting the regional variations in oxygenation is presented, using images obtained from a canine study under controlled conditions. The objective of this study is to overcome the rather subjective step of windowing by establishing an optimal colormap that permits visualization of statistical changes in signal intensities between healthy and pathological cases. In addition, graph theory is used to derive a quantitative metric indicative of changes in myocardial oxygenation. The purpose of this effort is to facilitate the evaluation of myocardial BOLD images by automating the detection of regional abnormalities in MO under pharmacological stress in the presence of coronary artery stenosis.}, url = {http://eprints.imtlucca.it/829/} }