Segmentation and 3-D reconstruction of histological sections of the heart

In this paper, we describe a method for the segmentation and 3-D reconstruction of a myocardial necrosis that follows an anti-arrhythmic catheter ablation intervention. The method uses digitized color images of sections of the heart excised by a pathologist for examination. The three color band images are first reduced into two principal components using the Hotelling transform; segmentation is then performed with a gradient based clustering method. Since the 3-D reconstruction is difficult to accomplish using only the few sections that may be excised, intermediate sections are generated with a dynamic elastic interpolation technique. The volume thus obtained can be visualized using a volume rendering technique. It can also be used to better understand the relationship between the necrosis morphology and various ablation parameters (catheter position, shock intensity and duration, …).