Approved research

Construction of Multi-dimensional Statistical Shape Model for a heart

Lay summary

Statistical Shape Model (SSM) of a target organ quantitatively describes the average and variance of the organ among individuals. Since the SSM enables to estimate the whole shape of a target organ from its partial shape data, SSM is used in various computer-aided treatment and diagnosis systems. Conventional SSMs describe the shape variation of motionless organs (e.g. bone). On the other hand, few description methods consider the deformation of organs (e.g. heart). The aim of our research is to construct a new multi-dimensional SSM for the heart that describes not only inter-individual differences of cardiac shape but also the cardiac deformation. One potential application using the multi-dimensional SSM for the heart is to estimate the movement of the patient heart in a cardiac cycle from the partial shape of the patient heart at a certain time. Accordingly incorporating the multi-dimensional SSM for the heart into a computer-aided system leads to the improvement of the efficient and highly accurate treatment / diagnosis for hearts.