Patient specific heart models from high resolution CT

Computer Tomography (CT) and in particular super fast, 64 and 256 detector CT has rapidly advanced over recent years, such that high resolution cardiac imaging has become a reality. In this paper, we provide a solution to the problem of automatically constructing three dimensional (3D) finite-element mesh models (FEM) of the human heart directly from high resolution CT. Our overall computational pipeline from 3D imaging to FEM models has five main steps, namely, (i) discrete voxel segmentation of the CT (ii) discrete topological noise filtering to remove non-regularized, and small geometric measure artifacts (iii) a reconstruction of the inner and outer surface boundaries of the human heart and its chambers (iv) computation of the medial axis of the heart boundaries and a volumetric decomposition of the heart into tubular, planar and chunky regions, (v) a flexible match and fit of each of the decomposed volumetric regions using segmented anatomical volumetric templates obtained from a 3D model heart.