Effects of fibrosis morphology on reentrant ventricular tachycardia inducibility and simulation fidelity in patient-derived models.

Myocardial fibrosis detected via delayed-enhanced magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) has been shown to be a strong indicator for ventricular tachycardia (VT) inducibility. However, little is known regarding how inducibility is affected by the details of the fibrosis extent, morphology, and border zone configuration. The objective of this article is to systematically study the arrhythmogenic effects of fibrosis geometry and extent, specifically on VT inducibility and maintenance.

Fast, accurate, and fully automatic segmentation of the right ventricle in short-axis cardiac MRI.

This paper presents a fully automatic method to segment the right ventricle (RV) from short-axis cardiac MRI. A combination of a novel window-constrained accumulator thresholding technique, binary difference of Gaussian (DoG) filters, optimal thresholding, and morphology are utilized to drive the segmentation. A priori segmentation window constraints are incorporated to guide and refine the process, as well as to ensure appropriate area confinement of the segmentation.

Accurate reconstruction of 3D cardiac geometry from coarsely-sliced MRI.

We present a comprehensive validation analysis to assess the geometric impact of using coarsely-sliced short-axis images to reconstruct patient-specific cardiac geometry. The methods utilize high-resolution diffusion tensor MRI (DTMRI) datasets as reference geometries from which synthesized coarsely-sliced datasets simulating in vivo MRI were produced. 3D models are reconstructed from the coarse data using variational implicit surfaces through a commonly used modeling tool, CardioViz3D.