Toward modeling of regional myocardial ischemia and infarction: generation of realistic coronary arterial tree for the heart model of the XCAT phantom

Abstract

A realistic 3D coronary arterial tree (CAT) has been developed for the heart model of the computer generated 3D XCAT phantom. The CAT allows generation of a realistic model of the location, size and shape of the associated regional ischemia or infarction for a given coronary arterial stenosis or occlusion. This in turn can be used in medical imaging applications. An iterative rule-based generation method that systematically utilized anatomic, morphometric and physiologic knowledge was used to construct a detailed realistic 3D model of the CAT in the XCAT phantom. The anatomic details of the myocardial surfaces and large coronary arterial vessel segments were first extracted from cardiac CT images of a normal patient with right coronary dominance. Morphometric information derived from porcine data from the literature, after being adjusted by scaling laws, provided statistically nominal diameters, lengths, and connectivity probabilities of the generated coronary arterial segments in modeling the CAT of an average human. The largest six orders of the CAT were generated based on the physiologic constraints defined in the coronary generation algorithms. When combined with the heart model of the XCAT phantom, the realistic CAT provides a unique simulation tool for the generation of realistic regional myocardial ischemia and infraction. Together with the existing heart model, the new CAT provides an important improvement over the current 3D XCAT phantom in providing a more realistic model of the normal heart and the potential to simulate myocardial diseases in evaluation of medical imaging instrumentation, image reconstruction, and data processing methods.