4D Cardiac Reconstruction and Blood Flow Simulation

Following a heart attack or the development of some cardiovascular diseases, the movement of the heart walls during the cardiac cycle may change, which affects the motion of blood through the heart, potentially leading to an increased risk of thrombus. While Doppler ultrasound and MRI can be used to monitor valvular blood flow, the image resolutions are low and they cannot capture the interactions between the highly complex heart wall and the blood flow. For this reason, with the rapid development of high-resolution cardiac CT, patient-specific blood flow simulation can provide a useful tool for the study of cardiac blood flow.

Recent developments on CT technologies have made the acquisition of high-resolution 4D  cardiac images possible. We present a framework that uses this data to reconstruct the 4D motion of the endocardial surface of the left ventricle for a full cardiac cycle. This reconstruction framework captures the motion of the full 3D surfaces of the complex anatomical features, such as the papillary muscles and the ventricular trabeculae, for the first time.

We then present a method to simulate and visualize blood flow through the heart, using the reconstructed 4D motion of the endocardial surface of the left ventricle as boundary conditions. The reconstruction captures the motion of the full 3D surfaces of the complex features, such as the papillary muscles and the ventricular trabeculae. We use visualizations of the flow field to view the interactions between the blood and the trabeculae in far more detail than has been achieved previously, which promises to give a better understanding of cardiac flow.

Publications

  • Scott Kulp, Mingchen Gao, Shaoting Zhang, Zhen Qian, Szilard Voros, Leon Axel, and Dimitris Metaxas. "Using High Resolution Cardiac CT Data to Model and Visualize Patient-Specific Interactions Between Trabeculae and Blood Flow." Proceedings of the Fourteenth International Conference on Medical Image Computing and Computer Assisted Intervention. 2011.
  • Mingchen Gao, Junzhou Huang, Shaoting Zhang, Zhen Qian, Szilard Voros, Dimitris Metaxas, and Leon Axel. "4D Cardiac Reconstruction Using High Resolution CT Images." Proceedings of the Sixth International Conference on Functional Imaging and Modeling of the Heart. 2011.
  • Scott Kulp, Dimitris Metaxas, Zhen Qian, Szilard Voros, Leon Axel, and Viorel Mihalef. "Patient-Specific Modeling and Visualization of Blood Flow through the Heart." Proceedings of the Eighth International Symposium on Biomedical Imaging. 2011.
  • Viorel Mihalef, Dimitris Metaxas, Mark Sussman, Vassilios Hurmusiadis, Leon Axel. "Atrioventricular blood flow simulation based on patient-specific data". Proceedings of FIMH 2009.