Towards a simplified cardiac fiber architecture — Multiscale fiber merging

Cardiac tractography consists in generating fiber paths for representing and visualizing cardiac fiber architecture. In this process, a large redundant number of fiber paths are usually generated in order to cover the whole myocardium. However, it is difficult to render and visualize dense fibers, and this poses problems for further qualitative and quantitative analysis of cardiac fiber structure. We propose a sparse cardiac fiber structure representation to highlight the main cardiac architecture and perform effective visualization and quantitative analysis. To this end, a fiber oriented approach, called fiber merging, is developed that allows us to obtain simplified cardiac fiber architecture. Fiber merging is achieved by averaging and connecting fiber segments according to a cell grid. Experiments on real cardiac data show that the produced simplified fiber architecture can highlight the cardiac fiber configuration.