Section: New Results

Generation of patient-specific cardiac vascular networks

Participant: Hugues Talbot (in collaboration with C. Jaquet, L. Najman, ESIEE Paris; L. Grady, M. Schaap, B. Spain, H. Kim, C. Taylor, HeartFlow; I. Vignon-Clementel, REO)

In this work, we have proposed a blood-vessel generation procedure for extending known patient vasculature over and within the heart ventricle [8]. It is patient-specific, in the sense that it extend the known, segmented patient vasculature, and it is consistent with physics-based blood vessels characteristics (i.e. derived from CFD) and known vessel physiology. The generated vascular network bridges the gap between the vasculature that can be imaged and assessed via classical means (CT or MRI) and perfusion maps that can be imaged with specific modalities (radiotracer injected scintigraphy or PET). One objective of this work is to eventually propose a forward model for perfusion map generation, that can be used to solved the associated inverse problem of finding the cause of observed perfusion deficits associated with coronary diseases that cannot be imaged directly.