Visualization of cardiac bioelectricity-a case study

A project in the field of computational electrocardiography which requires visualization of complex, three-dimensional geometry and electric potential and current fields is described. Starting from magnetic resonance images (MRIs) from a healthy subject, a multisurfaced model of the human thorax was constructed and used as the basis for computational studies relating potential distributions measured from the surface of the heart to potentials and currents throughout the volume of the thorax (a form of the forward problem in electrocardiography). Both interactive and batch-mode graphics programs were developed to view, manipulate, and interactively edit the model geometry. Results are presented