A systematic review of cardiac clinical trials.

Computational models of the heart are now being used to assess the effectiveness and feasibility of interventions through clinical trials (ISCTs). As the adoption and acceptance of ISCTs increases, best practices for reporting the methodology and analysing the results will emerge. Focusing in the area of cardiology, we aim to evaluate the types of ISCTs, their analysis methods and their reporting standards.

Evaluation of an open-source pipeline to create patient-specific left atrial models: A reproducibility study.

This work presents an open-source software pipeline to create patient-specific left atrial models with fibre orientations and a fibrDEFAULTosis map, suitable for electrophysiology simulations, and quantifies the intra and inter observer reproducibility of the model creation. The semi-automatic pipeline takes as input a contrast enhanced magnetic resonance angiogram, and a late gadolinium enhanced (LGE) contrast magnetic resonance (CMR). Five operators were allocated 20 cases each from a set of 50 CMR datasets to create a total of 100 models to evaluate inter and intra-operator variability.

Optimisation of Left Atrial Feature Tracking Using Retrospective Gated Computed Tomography Images.

Retrospective gated cardiac computed tomography (CCT) images can provide high contrast and resolution images of the heart throughout the cardiac cycle. Feature tracking in retrospective CCT images using the temporal sparse free-form deformations (TSFFDs) registration method has previously been optimised for the left ventricle (LV). However, there is limited work on optimising nonrigid registration methods for feature tracking in the left atria (LA).

Applications of multimodality imaging for left atrial catheter ablation.

Atrial arrhythmias, including atrial fibrillation and atrial flutter, may be treated through catheter ablation. The process of atrial arrhythmia catheter ablation, which includes patient selection, pre-procedural planning, intra-procedural guidance, and post-procedural assessment, is typically characterized by the use of several imaging modalities to sequentially inform key clinical decisions. Increasingly, advanced imaging modalities are processed via specialized image analysis techniques and combined with intra-procedural electrical measurements to inform treatment approaches.