Modeling heart wall myofibers

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Understanding the geometrical structure of heart wall myofibers, which drive the contraction of the heart to pump blood, is a crucial step in producing personalized models of heart function. Such models can then be used for therapy planning and guidance in a variety of conditions and injuries. In order to address this issue, we have recently developed a set of medical image analysis algorithms, designed to recover the geometry of the heart myofibers from diffusion magnetic resonance imaging (DMRI), the state-of-the-art technique for imaging fibrous tissue, such as the heart myocardium. Our main results suggest that heart myofibers lie in a geometrically optimal organization. In order to study the basic properties of this organization, we have developed and validated algorithms to extract information from ex vivo human and animal DMRI data. To address challenges faced by in vivo clinical DMRI, we refined these algorithms and demonstrated their potential to handle noisy and incomplete DMRI acquisitions. We propose to pursue two objectives to further develop this technology: