  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.
