A two-level transfer function based method for heart display with vascular tissue and scar enhancement

Abstract

Procedural guidance using high-resolution, three-dimensional (3D) myocardial scar mapping may offer assistance in directing catheter ablation therapy aimed at eliminating re-entrant arrhythmic pathways. For the purpose of pre-procedural planning and intra-procedural guidance, determining the spatial relationship between myocardial scar, cardiac chambers and vascular structures is a crucial step towards the delivery of percutaneous, image-guided ablative therapies with minimal fluoroscopic support. An important part of such a procedure is the spatial structure display, during which the transfer function (TF) adjustment is a mandatory operation. However, the TF tuning is a time consuming process and it is still a challenge to achieve a uniform mapping rule for creating an optimized visual result. In this paper, we propose several image processing algorithms and a new two-level TF based classification technique to address this problem. Our method improves the user performance and the visual uniformity of the resultant cardiac images.