A deep-learning approach for direct whole-heart mesh reconstruction

Automated construction of surface geometries of cardiac structures from volumetric medical images is important for a number of clinical applications. While deep-learning-based approaches have demonstrated promising reconstruction precision, these approaches have mostly focused on voxel-wise segmentation followed by surface reconstruction and post-processing techniques. However, such approaches suffer from a number of limitations including disconnected regions or incorrect surface topology due to erroneous segmentation and stair-case artifacts due to limited segmentation resolution. We propose a novel deep-learning-based approach that directly predicts whole heart surface meshes from volumetric CT and MR image data. Our approach leverages a graph convolutional neural network to predict deformation on mesh vertices from a pre-defined mesh template to reconstruct multiple anatomical structures in a 3D image volume. Our method demonstrated promising performance of generating whole heart reconstructions with as good or better accuracy than prior deep-learning-based methods on both CT and MR data. Furthermore, by deforming a template mesh, our method can generate whole heart geometries with better anatomical consistency and produce high-resolution geometries from lower resolution input image data. Our method was also able to produce temporally-consistent surface mesh predictions for heart motion from CT or MR cine sequences, and therefore can potentially be applied for efficiently constructing 4D whole heart dynamics. Our code and pre-trained networks are available at https://github.com/fkong7/MeshDeformNet