Estimation of ventricular fiber orientations in infarcted hearts for patient-specific simulations

Patient-specific modeling of the heart is limited by lack of technology to acquire myocardial fiber orientations in the clinic. To overcome this limitation, we recently developed an image-based methodology to estimate the fiber orientations. In this study, we test the efficacy of that methodology in infarcted hearts. To this end, we implemented a processing pipeline to compare estimated fiber orientations of infarcted hearts with measured ones, and quantify the effect of the estimation error on outcomes of electrophysiological simulations. The pipeline was applied to images that we acquired from three infarcted canine hearts. The new insights obtained from the project will pave the way for the development of patient-specific models of infarcted hearts that can aid physicians in personalized diagnosis and decisions regarding electrophysiological interventions.