Building a 4D atlas of the cardiac anatomy and motion using MR imaging

In this paper we describe the construction of 4D atlas of human heart using cardiac MR imaging. This probabilistic atlas captures the cardiac anatomy and function of a healthy heart. In order to build the atlas we have acquired tagged as well as untagged MR image sequences from 11 healthy volunteers. The untagged MR image sequences for each subject are segmented and then mapped into a common reference coordinate system using a novel spatio-temporal registration algorithm to produce a 4D probabilistic model of the cardiac anatomy. In addition, the tagged MR image sequences are used to derive motion fields between the end-diastolic and the end-systolic frames which describe myocardial contraction patterns in each subject. These motion fields are also mapped into our spatio-temporal reference coordinate system to produce a 4D statistical model of cardiac function.