Creating shape templates for patient specific biventricular modeling in congenital heart disease.

Survival rates for infants with congenital heart disease (CHD) are improving, resulting in a growing population of adults with CHD. However, the analysis of left and right ventricular function is very time-consuming owing to the variety of congenital morphologies. Efficient customization of patient geometry and function depends on high quality shape templates specifically designed for the application. In this paper, we combine a method for creating finite element shape templates with an interactive template customization to patient MRI examinations. This enables different templates to be chosen depending on patient morphology. To demonstrate this pipeline, a new biventricular template with 162 elements was created and tested in place of an existing 82-element template. The method was able to provide fast interactive biventricular analysis with 0.31 sec per edit response time. The new template was customized to 13 CHD patients with similar biventricular topology, showing improved performance over the previous template and good agreement with clinical indices.