Heart diseases are the leading cause of death in developed countries, hence, understanding of the hemodynamics of the heart is critically important to enable methods for cardiovascular diagnosis. Assessment of intracardiac blood pressure is highly interesting as blood flow is driven by the pressure differences. Phase-contrast magnetic resonance imaging (PC-MRI) is a tool for measuring blood flow and has a wide range of cardiovascular applications. Based on previous studies, an approach to estimate the relative pressure fields in the human heart from three-dimensional time-resolved PC-MRI velocity data was implemented and evaluated. The relative pressure fields were obtained by solving the pressure Poisson equation, using a multi-grid approach. The method was evaluated on a numerical phantom and on PC-MRI data from one healthy subject and one patient with dilated cardiomyopathy. The pressure field was visualized in combination with blood flow data and morphological images. Results indicate that the used approach works well for cardiac relative pressure estimation and are in agreement with findings from previous research. The complete spatial and temporal coverage of relative pressure enables a higher understanding of physiology and pathophysiology of the human heart and is expected to give new insights for clinical investigations.

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