Cardiac reconstruction and analysis from high resolution CT images

OF THE DISSERTATION Cardiac Reconstruction and Analysis from High Resolution CT Images by Mingchen Gao Dissertation Director: Professor Dimitris N. Metaxas Heart disease is a major cause of mortality worldwide. Detecting/diagnosing such diseases in their early stages is critical, and heavily depends on non-invasive imaging methods, e.g., computed tomography (CT) and magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). High resolution cardiac CT imaging technology has the resolution to reveal the complex endocardial structures of the left ventricle, such as the trabeculae and the papillary muscles. However, the development of suitable methods for the quantitative analysis of these dense data sources has lagged greatly behind the development of the imaging methods themselves. As a result, in clinical practice, and in much of the research that uses these imaging data, the quantitative analysis of cardiac function has largely been confined to the calculation of simple measures of global function, such as the ejection fraction, while local function being just qualitatively assessed. Therefore there is a large amount of the functional information potentially available from cardiac images essentially untouched. In this thesis, for the first time, we extract clinical meaningful endocardial information of the left ventricle (LV) from high resolution CT images. The reconstructed result captured the fine detailed structures, which are extremely challenging to segment due to their delicate and complex nature in both geometry and topology. Our