Impacts of Spherical Harmonics Shape Descriptors on the Inter-Slice Interpolation of MR Images

One of the prevalent challenges in heart imaging via some 3D medical image modalities like cine-MRI is the large voxel anisotropy in acquired short-axis slices. In fact, due to some of the inherent limitation in the capacity of these imaging systems, segmented images suffer from significant staircase artifact in the direction of the heart long-axis. Therefore reconstructed 3D surfaces from these labeled images are not ideal for other accurate 3D analyses and inter-slice interpolation is needed to generate new slices between existing ones. The purpose of this paper is to generate 3D Spherical Harmonic (SH) surface of the heart left ventricle (LV) using anisotropic resolution images and assessment this claim that these SH surfaces are included of interpolated slices with good approximations. So the main contribution of this paper is to demonstrate the SPHARM robustness and ability to generate a smooth surface of the left ventricle without abrupt changes in edges nevertheless keeps the anatomical details and without production of over smooth interpolated shape.