Interactive Cardiac Image Analysis for Biventricular Function of the Human Heart

We developed an interactive tool for biventricular function analysis from cardiac magnetic resonance (MR) images based on the guide point modelling (GPM) approach [1]. First we built a deformable model of both ventricles of the human heart which consisted of 138 nodes and 82 hexahedral elements, each with bicubic-Bezier-linear interpolation. The model was fitted to a digitized human data set for use as the prior shape in the GPM scheme, which we modified to have a 'predictor' step that used a host mesh fitting algorithm [2] to generate predicted points (PPs) based on the user-defined guide points (GPs). Then the model was fitted towards both GPs and PPs through linear least square minimization. The inclusion of the PPs significantly improved the numerical stability of the linear least square fit and significantly accelerated the solution time. This methodology requires further validation for future application in clinical biventricular analysis.