Quantitative CMR population imaging on 20,000 subjects of the UK Biobank imaging study: LV/RV quantification pipeline and its evaluation.

Population imaging studies generate data for developing and implementing personalised health strategies to prevent, or more effectively treat disease. Large prospective epidemiological studies acquire imaging for pre-symptomatic populations. These studies enable the early discovery of alterations due to impending disease, and enable early identification of individuals at risk.

Automatic initialization and quality control of large-scale cardiac MRI segmentations.

Continuous advances in imaging technologies enable ever more comprehensive phenotyping of human anatomy and physiology. Concomitant reduction of imaging costs has resulted in widespread use of imaging in large clinical trials and population imaging studies. Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI), in particular, offers one-stop-shop multidimensional biomarkers of cardiovascular physiology and pathology.

Statistical shape modeling of the left ventricle: myocardial infarct classification challenge.

Statistical shape modeling is a powerful tool for visualizing and quantifying geometric and functional patterns of the heart. After myocardial infarction (MI), the left ventricle typically remodels in response to physiological challenges. Several methods have been proposed in the literature to describe statistical shape changes.

Evaluation of state-of-the-art segmentation algorithms for left ventricle infarct from late Gadolinium enhancement MR images.

Studies have demonstrated the feasibility of late Gadolinium enhancement (LGE) cardiovascular magnetic resonance (CMR) imaging for guiding the management of patients with sequelae to myocardial infarction, such as ventricular tachycardia and heart failure. Clinical implementation of these developments necessitates a reproducible and reliable segmentation of the infarcted regions. It is challenging to compare new algorithms for infarct segmentation in the left ventricle (LV) with existing algorithms.

An Algorithm for the Segmentation of Highly Abnormal Hearts Using a Generic Statistical Shape Model.

Statistical shape models (SSMs) have been widely employed in cardiac image segmentation. However, in conditions that induce severe shape abnormality and remodeling, such as in the case of pulmonary hypertension (PH) or hypertrophic cardiomyopathy (HCM), a single SSM is rarely capable of capturing the anatomical variability in the extremes of the distribution. This work presents a new algorithm for the segmentation of severely abnormal hearts.

Joint Clustering and Component Analysis of Correspondenceless Point Sets: Application to Cardiac Statistical Modeling.

Construction of Statistical Shape Models (SSMs) from arbitrary point sets is a challenging problem due to significant shape variation and lack of explicit point correspondence across the training data set. In medical imaging, point sets can generally represent different shape classes that span healthy and pathological exemplars. In such cases, the constructed SSM may not generalize well, largely because the probability density function (pdf) of the point sets deviates from the underlying assumption of Gaussian statistics.

Effect of statistically derived fiber models on the estimation of cardiac electrical activation.

Myocardial fiber orientation plays a critical role in the electrical activation and subsequent contraction of the heart. To increase the clinical potential of electrophysiological (EP) simulation for the study of cardiac phenomena and the planning of interventions, accurate personalization of the fibers is a necessary yet challenging task. Due to the difficulties associated with the in vivo imaging of cardiac fiber structure, researchers have developed alternative techniques to personalize fibers.

Statistical personalization of ventricular fiber orientation using shape predictors.

This paper presents a predictive framework for the statistical personalization of ventricular fibers. To this end, the relationship between subject-specific geometry of the left (LV) and right ventricles (RV) and fiber orientation is learned statistically from a training sample of ex vivo diffusion tensor imaging datasets. More specifically, the axes in the shape space which correlate most with the myocardial fiber orientations are extracted and used for prediction in new subjects.

Automatic cardiac LV segmentation in MRI using modified graph cuts with smoothness and interslice constraints.

Purpose: Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), specifically late-enhanced MRI, is the standard clinical imaging protocol to assess cardiac viability. Segmentation of myocardial walls is a prerequisite for this assessment. Automatic and robust multisequence segmentation is required to support processing massive quantities of data.