A comprehensive shape model of the heart

Domain knowledge about the geometrical properties of cardiac structures is an important ingredient for the segmentation of these structures in medical images or for the simulation of cardiac physiology. So far, a strong focus was put on the left ventricle due to its importance for the general pumping performance of the heart and related functional indices. However, other cardiac structures are of similar importance, e.g., the coronary arteries with respect to diagnosis and treatment of arteriosclerosis or the left atrium with respect to the treatment of atrial fibrillation. In this paper we describe the generation of a geometric cardiac model including the four cardiac chambers and the trunks of the connected vasculature, as well as the coronary arteries and a set of cardiac landmarks. A mean geometric model for the end-diastolic heart has been built based on 27 cardiac CT datasets and has been evaluated with respect to its capability to estimate the position of cardiac structures. Allowing a similarity transformation to adapt the model to image data, cardiac surface positions can be predicted with an accuracy of below 5 mm.