Application of an adaptive control grid interpolation technique to total cavopulmonary connection blood flow image reconstruction

摘要

The total cavopulmonary connection (TCPC) is a surgical procedure employed to treat children with single-ventricle congenital heart defects. The surgical procedure involves anastomosis of the superior and inferior vena cavae to the unbranched right pulmonary artery. Post-operative imaging of the subsequent blood flow is an integral step in the assessment of the efficacy of the procedure. We have developed a method using an adaptive control grid interpolation technique that allows rapid reconstruction of total cavopulmonary connection blood flow from a series of MR images taken from different coronal planes. Such flow reconstructions can be used as qualitative analysis tools for physicians and their corresponding morphology reconstructions as guidelines to create computational fluid dynamics (CFD) models for quantitative analysis of the flow characteristics of the TCPC. There has been considerable attention given in the past to the development of medical imaging techniques for the acquisition of three-dimensional information from patients. With the emergence of Magnetic Resonance Imaging as a tool with powerful breadth in application there have been numerous techniques focused on utilizing MR to extract this type of data. Traditional MR imaging produces two-dimensional images that offer limited information to physicians attempting to analyze three-dimensional flow. Volumetric MR imaging methods extract high quality comprehensive information, but demand extensive scan time even for relatively small volumes. Our reconstruction method is an alternative that provides the desired information without excessive acquisition time. A reconstruction of a patient's TCPC blood flow is displayed in Figure 1.