A fiber orientation model of the human heart using classical histological methods, magnetic resonance imaging and interpolation techniques

We present a cardiac model of post-mortem heart that can be applied to quantitative analysis of electrocardiologic problems. Two adult postmortem hearts in the systolic state were photographed and then were subjected to MRI scanning. Hence, anatomical slicing was performed using an automatic cutter that created 3 mm thick sections. The first one dissected vertical to its longitudinal axis, and the second one at the sagittal plane. Each section was further diced into smaller specimens for further histological process. All the microscopic slides were digitized in order to be used for histological sections reconstructing. The need to define the fiber orientation led us to create a specific drawing package in MATLABreg called FiberCad. For each point of the extracted model, information of the electrical characteristics and the prevalent fiberspsila orientation can be accurately modeled.