Cardiac fiber tracking on super high-resolution CT images: a comparative study.

Hirohisa Oda,Noriko Usami,Yuji Narita,Kensaku Mori,Masahiro Oda,Tetsuya Yuasa,Masami Ando,Toshiaki Akita,Naoki Sunaguchi,Shu Ichihara,Daisuke Shimao,Takaaki Sugino,Holger R Roth

doi:10.1117/1.jmi.7.2.026001

Abstract

.Purpose: High-resolution cardiac imaging and fiber analysis methods are required to understand cardiac anatomy. Although refraction-contrast x-ray CT (RCT) has high soft tissue contrast, it cannot be commonly used because it requires a synchrotron system. Microfocus x-ray CT () is another commercially available imaging modality.Approach: We evaluate the usefulness of for analyzing fibers by quantitatively and objectively comparing the results with RCT. To do so, we scanned a rabbit heart by both modalities with our original protocol of prepared materials and compared their image-based analysis results, including fiber orientation estimation and fiber tracking.Results: Fiber orientations estimated by two modalities were closely resembled under the correlation coefficient of 0.63. Tracked fibers from both modalities matched well the anatomical knowledge that fiber orientations are different inside and outside of the left ventricle. However, the volume caused incorrect tracking around the boundaries caused by stitching scanning.Conclusions: Our experimental results demonstrated that scanning can be used for cardiac fiber analysis, although further investigation is required in the differences of fiber analysis results on RCT and .

Highlights

Deep understanding of the cardiac fiber structure in the left ventricle (LV) is required to understand cardiac anatomy and such diseases as heart failure. 6.5 million people experienced heart failure between 2011 and 2014 in the United States.[1]
Our experimental results demonstrated that μCT scanning can be used for cardiac fiber analysis, further investigation is required of the differences of the fiber analysis results on ray CT (RCT) and μCT
We described our fiber analysis methods from the RCT or μCT volumes of the heart and analyzed how μCT produces proper results using our methods by comparing them with RCT

Summary

Introduction

Deep understanding of the cardiac fiber structure in the left ventricle (LV) is required to understand cardiac anatomy and such diseases as heart failure. 6.5 million people experienced heart failure between 2011 and 2014 in the United States.[1]. Oda et al.: Cardiac fiber tracking on super high-resolution CT images: a comparative study. High-resolution cardiac imaging and analysis methods in three-dimensional (3-D) space are needed. Diffusion tensor magnetic resonance imaging (DT-MRI) is well-known for analyzing cardiac fiber structure.[2,3,4] With DT-MRI, we estimate the fiber orientation at a point as the orientation with the strongest diffusion of water molecules. Histopathological images have been used[5,6] for cardiac imaging with much higher resolution than DT-MRI. Precise reconstruction of the heart’s stacked section images is complicated due to the tissue damage caused by cutting the sections and the banana problem.7 3-D analysis from a heart’s histopathological stacks is very difficult

Methods

Results

Discussion

Conclusion