Construction of endocardial and epicardial surface models from segmented MRI

Abstract

This paper presents a novel method for the construction of endocardial and epicardial surface models from 3D short-axis cardiac magnetic resonance images with strongly anisotropic voxels in the long-axis direction. The same algorithm is independently used to generate the surface meshes of the epicardium and endocardium of the four cardiac chambers. The proposed method provides smooth meshes of the heart chambers despite the strong voxel anisotropy. This is not the case for the marching cubes algorithm. Furthermore, the presented method generates more regular mesh triangles than the marching cubes and allows for a complete control of the number of triangles. However, the generated surface meshes are still close to the ones obtained by the marching cubes. For the five tested cases, the average distance between the surfaces generated by our method and by the marching cubes algorithm was 0.4 mm.