High Quality Appearance Models of Heart Sub-Components Based on MR Images

High quality images have many uses, such as the testing of image processing algorithms and serving as templates for registration in image guided surgery. This work describes the creation of four high quality images or "appearance models", for 1. Myocardium, 2. Right atrium and ventricle, 3. Left atrium and aorta, and 4. Epicardial surface. The appearance models are created by registering and averaging together a series of high-resolution MR images of the same volunteer. These are then corrected to represent the average shape as determined from MR data of ten other volunteers. Thus, we show how single volunteer imaging can be combined with image registration to generate average-shape appearance models with high resolution and signal-to-noise ratio. Our final data consist of four 3D average shape appearance models (each depicting one of the sub-heart components) with 1.5 x 1.5 x 1.5 mm³voxels and a signal-to-noise ratio increase of 6.6 versus raw data.