Visualization of the Fibrous Structure of the heart

There is need for detailed knowledge about the changes in the structure of the muscle fibers of the heart after an ischemic infarction. In order to improve the treatment of this illness, it is crucial to understand the adaptation of the structure. Diffusion Tensor Imaging (DTI) is a non-destructive technique that can be used to reconstruct the structure of the fibers in the heart wall. The visualization of this vast amount of densely packed fibers is a challenging problem. In order to understand the structure, it is necessary to convey both the shapes of the fibers, and their mutual coherency. We propose to use line illumination and shadowing of fibers in order to improve the perception of their structure. Using these methods, we present an intuitive way to visualize the structure together with other properties, while avoiding cluttering. The presented methods were applied to a series of healthy and ischemic mouse hearts. These methods helped the user to gain insight in the fibrous structure of the heart.

@InProceedings { PVS06,
  author       = "Peeters, T.H.J.M. and Vilanova, Anna and Strijkers, G.J. and Haar Romeny, B.M. ter",
  title        = "Visualization of the Fibrous Structure of the heart",
  booktitle    = "Vision Modeling and Visualization-VMV 2006",
  pages        = "309-317",
  month        = "Nov",
  year         = "2006",
  url          = "http://graphics.tudelft.nl/Publications-new/2006/PVS06"
}