3D representation and deformation analysis of the heart walls from X-ray and MR images

Presents a deformation analysis of the heart walls. The authors use a thin plate spline representation of the surface which has several advantages. This parametric representation is obtained through a regularization process to restrict the space of possible solutions. It is viewpoint independent and allows a surface to be defined by a limited number of control points. The distributions of two curvature indices, which are easily computed from the analytic formulation, characterize the surface locally. Experiments on 3D data of the left ventricle of a dog´s heart show the reliability of the computed curvatures and will be helpful in the assessment of the local deformations.<>