Left ventricular heart phantom for wall motion analysis

Abstract

In interventional cardiology, three-dimensional anatomical and functional information of the cardiac chambers, e.g. the left ventricle, would have an important impact on diagnosis and therapy. With the technology of C-arm CT it is possible to reconstruct intraprocedural 3-D images from angiographic projection data. Due to the long acquisition time of several seconds, motion-related artifacts, like blurring or streaks, occur. Therefore, the heart dynamics need to be taken into account in order to improve the reconstruction results. When it comes to the evaluation of different motion estimation and compensation algorithms and techniques of motion analysis, there is still a lack of comparability of the final reconstructions and motion parameters between the research groups. Since the results are heavily dependent on the applied motion pattern and simulation parameters, the experiments are not reproducible. We try to overcome these problems by providing varying left heart ventricle phantom datasets, consisting of projection images as well as extracted surface meshes. Up to now, there are six different datasets available: one with a normal sinus rhythm, one with a normal sinus rhythm and a catheter, one with a lateral wall defect of the ventricle, two with a lateral contraction phase shift and one without any motion. The existing datasets are based on a phantom similar to the 4D XCAT phantom with a contrasted left ventricle, myocardium, and aorta. The geometry calibration and acquisition protocol from a real clinical C-arm scanner are used. A webpage is provided where the data and the necessary files are publicly available for download at conrad.stanford.edu/data/heart.