Simulation of late gadolinium enhancement cardiac magnetic resonance studies

In this study we propose a pipeline for simulation of late gadolinium enhancement images. We used a modified version of the XCAT phantom to improve simulation realism. Modifications included the modeling of trabeculae and papillary muscles, and the increase of sublabels to resemble tissue intensity variability. Magnetic properties for each body tissue were sampled in three settings: from Gaussian distributions, combining Rayleigh-Gaussian distributions, and from Rayleigh distributions. Thirty-two simulated datasets were compared with 32 clinical datasets from infarcted patients. Histograms were obtained for five tissues: lung, pericardium, myocardium, blood and hyper-enhanced area. Real and simulated histograms were compared with the Chi-square dissimilarity metric (χ²) and Kullback-Leibler divergence (KL). The generated simulated images look similar to real images according to both metrics. Rayleigh and the Rayleigh-Gaussian models obtained comparable average results (respectively: χ² = 0.16 ± 0.12 and 0.18 ± 0.11; KL = 0.15 ± 0.17 and 0.16 ± 0.18).