ABSTRACT
Cardiac fiber imaging is an emerging technology that has many applications in cardiology, physiology, and pathology. Cardiac fibers are essential structural and electromechnical units for a beating heart to pump blood into circulation. As their orientations directly determine stress distributions within myocardium and electrical activation spreading among cardiac ventricles, cardiac fibers are helically arranged in normal myocardium to achieve optimal cardiac function. However, in cardiovascular diseases, cardiac fiber orientations may become abnormal, causing cardiac dysfunction that ultimately results in heart failure or sudden death. Thus, measuring abnormal fiber orientations from in vivo imaging could help the diagnosis and treatment of heart diseases. In this chapter, a geometric registration-based approach was described to estimate cardiac fiber orientations from three-dismensional ultrasound images. The approach was validated in rodent and porcine models. As cardiac ultrasound is the most routinely used examination in cardiology, estimating cardiac fiber orientations from cardiac ultrasound can provide valuable benefits for the diagnosis and treatment of cardiac diseases.
