Cardiac Fibre Trace Clustering for the Interpretation of the Human Heart Architecture

Cardiac fibre architecture plays a key role in heart function. Recently, the estimation of fibre structure has been simplified with diffusion tensor MRI (DT-MRI). In order to assess the heart architecture and its underlying function, with the goal of dealing with pathological tissues and easing inter-patient comparisons, we propose a methodology for finding cardiac myofibrille trace correspondences across a fibre population obtained from DT-MRI data. It relies on the comparison of geometrical and topological clustering operating on different fibre representation modes (fixed length sequences of 3-D coordinates with or without ordering strategy, and 9-D vectors for trace shape approximation). In geometrical clustering (or k-means) each fibre path is assigned to the cluster with nearest barycenter. In topological (or spectral) clustering the data is represented by a similarity graph and the graph vertices are divided into groups so that intra-cluster connectivity is maximized a...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2009
• Where: FIMH
• Authors: Carole Frindel, Marc C. Robini, Joël Schaerer, Pierre Croisille, Yue-Min Zhu
• Keywords: Cardiac fibre Architecture, FIMH 2009, Heart Architecture, Medical Imaging, fibre Representation Modes