Application of Micro-Computed Tomography with Iodine Staining to Cardiac Imaging Segmentation and Computational Model Development

摘要

Micro-computed tomography (micro-CT) has been widely used to generate high-resolution 3D tissue images from small animals non-destructively, especially for mineralized skeletal tissues. However, its application to the analysis of soft cardiovascular tissues has been limited by poor inter-tissue contrast. Recent ex vivo studies have shown that contrast between muscular and connective tissue in micro-CT images can be enhanced by staining with iodine. In the present study, we apply this novel technique for imaging of cardiovascular structures in canine hearts. We optimize the method to obtain high resolution X-ray micro-CT images of the canine atria and its distinctive regions - including the Bachmann’s bundle, atrioventricular node, pulmonary arteries and veins - with clear inter-tissue contrast. The imaging results are used to reconstruct and segment the detailed 3D geometry of the atria. Structure tensor analysis shows that the arrangement of atrial fibres can also be characterised using the enhanced micro-CT images, as iodine preferentially accumulates within the muscular fibres rather than in connective tissues. This novel technique can be particularly useful in non-destructive imaging of 3D cardiac architectures from large animals and humans, due to the combination of relatively high speed (~1 hour/scan of a large canine heart) and high voxel resolution (36 μm) provided. In summary, contrast micro-CT facilitates fast and non-destructive imaging and segmenting of detailed 3D cardiovascular geometries, as well as measuring fibre orientation, which are crucial in constructing biophysically detailed computational cardiac models.