A realistic anthropomorphic dynamic heart phantom

This paper presents a realistic numerical beating heart phantom. The development of such a model is motivated by the need of an appropriate ground truth reference for the evaluation of cardiac image processing algorithms. An anatomical model has been developed by extracting cardio-vascular structures contours from a 3D acquisition in magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) of a human healthy subject. Cardiac motion has been tracked by 3D non rigid registration between the consecutive linearly interpolated volumes from dynamic MRI sequences. The so-obtained numerical phantom is structurally rich and its motion realistic. As it issues from the same MRI acquisition on the same human healthy subject, it presents a very good overall consistency and will be use for cardiac image processing algorithms evaluation