Personalized 3D Myocardial Infarct Geometry Reconstruction from Cine MRI for Cardiac Digital Twins

2026-06-01Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
AI summary

The authors developed a new method to create detailed 3D models of heart damage caused by a heart attack, using regular MRI videos without needing special contrast dyes. Their model uses information about both the heart's shape and its motion over time to locate damaged areas more accurately. They tested their method on many MRI scans and found it worked well, closely matching traditional methods that use contrast agents. This could help patients who cannot use contrast dyes and improve heart simulations for treatment planning.

myocardial infarctioncardiac digital twinscine MRIlate gadolinium enhancement (LGE)3D reconstructionbiventricular meshspatiotemporal dependenciesAHA-17 segmentsDice scorein-silico simulation
Authors
Yilin Lyu, Mark YY Chan, Ching-Hui Sia, Lei Li
Abstract
Accurate 3D geometric characterization of myocardial infarction (MI) is essential for building cardiac digital twins (CDTs) to precisely simulate infarct-related electrophysiology. Late gadolinium enhancement magnetic resonance imaging (LGE MRI) is the clinical reference for locating MI, yet its reliance on contrast agents restricts use in renally impaired patients and limits longitudinal follow-ups. As an alternative, contrast-free cine MRI visualizes abnormal ventricular wall motion, which is highly indicative of the infarcted area. In this study, we propose a novel explicit geometry-motion embedded model to fully automatically reconstruct personalized, simulation-ready 3D MI geometries directly from multi-view cine MRIs. Specifically, we construct a 4D (3D + t) biventricular mesh to explicitly extract and decouple geometry-aware and motion-aware features. We further design a dual-branch module for adaptive geometry-motion fusion to capture spatiotemporal dependencies for mapping infarcted region. Furthermore, we introduce multi-scale supervision utilizing an AHA-17 segment-guided cross-attention mechanism to steer the prediction, ensuring biophysically consistent reconstruction. Experimental results on 225 cine MRIs demonstrated that the proposed 3D MI reconstruction achieved high performance with an average Dice score of 0.678 $\pm$ 0.011. In the downstream in-silico electrophysiological simulation evaluations, the results were highly consistent with the LGE-derived ground truth, highlighting the great potential of the proposed model for contrast-free scar characterization and seamless integration into CDT modeling. The code will be released publicly upon acceptance of the manuscript for publication.