Cardiac modeling using active appearance models and morphological operators

We present an approach for fast reconstructing of cardiac myocardium and blood masses of a patient's heart from morphological image data, acquired either MRI or CT, in order to estimate numerically the spread of electrical excitation in the patient's atria and ventricles. The approach can be divided into two main steps. During the first step the ventricular and atrial blood masses are extracted employing Active Appearance Models (AAM). The left and right ventricular blood masses are segmented automatically after providing the positions of the apex cordis and the base of the heart. Because of the complex geometry of the atria the segmentation process of the atrial blood masses requires more information as the ventricular blood mass segmentation process of the ventricles. We divided, for this reason, the left and right atrium into three divisions of appearance. This proved sufficient for the 2D AAM model to extract the target blood masses. The base of the heart, the left upper and left lower pulmonary vein from its first up to its last appearance in the image stack, and the right upper and lower pulmonary vein have to be marked. After separating the volume data into these divisions the 2D AAM search procedure extracts the blood masses which are the main input for the second and last step in the myocardium extraction pipeline. This step uses morphologically-based operations in order to extract the ventricular and atrial myocardium either directly by detecting the myocardium in the volume block or by reconstructing the myocardium using mean model information, in case the algorithm fails to detect the myocardium.