Abstract: Deep understanding of myocardial structure linking morphology and function of the heart would unravel crucial knowledge for medical and surgical clinical procedures and studies. Several conceptual models of myocardial fiber organization have been proposed but the lack of an automatic and objective methodology prevented an agreement. We sought to deepen in this knowledge through advanced computer graphic representations of the myocardial fiber architecture by diffusion tensor magnetic resonance imaging (DT-MRI).
We performed automatic tractography reconstruction of unsegmented DT-MRI canine heart datasets coming from the public database of the Johns Hopkins University. Full scale tractographies have been build with 200 seeds and are composed by streamlines computed on the vectorial field of primary eigenvectors given at the diffusion tensor volumes. Also, we introduced a novel multi-scale visualization technique in order to obtain a simplified tractography. This methodology allowed to keep the main geometric features of the fiber tracts, making easier to decipher the main properties of the architectural organization of the heart.
On the analysis of the output from our tractographic representations we found exact correlation with low-level details of myocardial architecture, but also with the more abstract conceptualization of a continuous helical ventricular myocardial fiber array.
Objective analysis of myocardial architecture by an automated method, including the entire myocardium and using several 3D levels of complexity, reveals a continuous helical myocardial fiber arrangement of both right and left ventricles, supporting the anatomical model of the helical ventricular myocardial band described by Torrent-Guasp.