4D (3D + time) model is valuable in comprehensive assessment of cardiac functions. Usually, the generation of the 4D myocardial models involves myocardium segmentation, mesh generation and non-rigid registration (to build mesh node correspondence). In this paper, we present a method to simultaneously perform the above tasks. This method begins from a triangular surface model of the myocardium at the first phase of a cardiac cycle. Then, the myocardial surface is simulated as a linear elastic membrane, and evolves toward the next phase governed by an energy function while maintaining the mesh quality. Our preliminary experiments performed on dynamic CT images of the dog demonstrated the effectiveness of this method on both segmentation and mesh generation. The minimum average surface distance between the segmentation results of the proposed method and the ground truth can reach 0.72 ± 0.55 mm, and the mesh quality measured by the aspect ratio of the triangle was less than 11.57 ± 1.18.

Date Published: 13 March 2013
PDF: 8 pages
Proc. SPIE 8669, Medical Imaging 2013: Image Processing, 86691Q (13 March 2013); doi: 10.1117/12.2007070

Published in SPIE Proceedings Vol. 8669:
Medical Imaging 2013: Image Processing
Sebastien Ourselin; David R. Haynor, Editor(s)