Papillary muscles analysis from high resolution CT using spatial-temporal skeleton extraction

In this paper, we propose methods to extract the motion of papillary muscles from high resolution CT images, and quantitatively characterize them by extracting spatio-temporal skeletons. This method first reconstructs and visualizes detailed models of papillary muscles using a two-stage coarse-to-fine registration. To describe the model´s shape and motion effectively and efficiently, high level abstractions of the models, i.e., the skeletons, are extracted with spatial and temporal constraints. Several skeleton-based indices are proposed to analyze the changes of model shapes and motions during a heart cycle. The experimental results show the robustness and efficiency of spatio-temporal skeletons, and the proposed indices are capable to demonstrate the differences between healthy and hypertrophic papillary muscles.