Copyright © 2012 Qiu Guan et al. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Abstract

This paper investigates automatic construction of a three-dimensional heart model from a set of medical images, represents it in a deformable shape, and uses it to perform volumetric measurements. This not only significantly improves its reliability and accuracy but also makes it possible to derive valuable novel information, like various assessment and dynamic volumetric measurements. The method is based on a flexible model trained from hundreds of patient image sets by a genetic algorithm, which takes advantage of complete segmentation of the heart shape to form a geometrical heart model. For an image set of a new patient, an interpretation scheme is used to obtain its shape and evaluate some important parameters. Apart from automatic evaluation of traditional heart functions, some new information of cardiovascular diseases may be recognized from the volumetric analysis.