CONSTRUCTIVE VOLUME GEOMETRY APPLIED TO VISUALIZATION OF CARDIAC ANATOMY AND ELECTROPHYSIOLOGY

Abstract

The complete virtual engineering of the entire beating heart requires the support of sophisticated visualization tools that can effectively extract meaningful visual information from a combination of data sets and depict complex spatial, temporal and physical properties encoded in the data sets. Traditional surface graphics techniques have not been able to serve such requirements adequately, largely because of the necessity of transforming field-based data sets (simulated computationally and recorded clinically or experimentally) to surface representations, and because of the information loss during the process. Constructive volume geometry is a new computer graphics technique, and like the virtual tissue engineering of the beating heart, it employs field-based data types as its intrinsic primitives. In this paper, we describe the application of constructive volume geometry to the visualization of cardiac anatomy and electrophysiology. We demonstrate the capability of this technique in generating visualizations that can depict multiple structures in a combination of data sets and heterogenous interior structure through effective use of opacity and combinational operators. This is applied to tracking and mapping intramural bundles of muscle fibres, and to map voltage isosurfaces of reentrant activity, and the filaments around which reentrant waves propagate.