4D Cardiac Segmentation and Respiratory Motion Modeling of the Human Heart

Abstract

Atrial Fibrillation (AF) is a growing problem in modern societies with an enormous impact in both short term quality of life and long term survival. A recently developed promising approach to cure AF uses radiofrequency (RF) ablation to carry out Pulmonary Vein Antrum Isolation (PVAI) to the heart. However, the lack of proper 3D surgery training, planning, and guidance makes surgery a very difficult task to the surgeons and therefore the risk for the patient increases. Some work has been done developing automatic methods to segment and track the beating movement of the heart, but the purpose of this work is to add the respiratory motion to the existent models. The reconstructed heart surface will serve as a virtual computer model for the 3D surgery training, planning and guidance.