Fast modelling of heart pathology with soft objects

Heart diseases cause considerable morbidity and the prognosis after heart failure is poor. Modelling the heart pathology is useful for diagnosis, analysis and treatment planning of cardiac diseases. This is in particular the case for congenital abnormalities where surgery is often necessary directly after birth. Over the past decade, a variety of tools for ventricular modelling have been suggested. However, most of them require either substantial user interaction or make use of the default topology of a healthy heart. In this paper, we present a modelling tool based on soft objects, which allows a fast semi-automatic approximation of the heart pathology. The tool requires little user interaction, works well for normal and abnormal heart topologies, and makes it easy to model cardiac arteries and veins.