Cardiovascularity ...

Atrial Fubrillation is a disorder found in almost 2.2 million americans. It is an abnormality where the atria of the heart is unable to pump out all the blood out of the heart. The pool of blood that remains may clot, and a stroke could result if such clots reaches an artery of the brain. 15% of strokes are caused due to Atrial Fubrillation. Catheter ablation is a treatment used to treat this disorder, and is normally used when drug therapy is no longer effective.

Catheter ablation is a very difficult and intricate process. A very minute device is inserted through the pulmonary artery of the heart. The pulmonary artery is usually accessed through the groin region, since it's relatively less hazardous to operate around that area. Once the device is inserted, it travels all the way up to the muscles surrouding the heart. The device has a special heater which can apply heat to tissues, killing them instantly. If we are able to successfully kill the tissues causing Atrial Fubrillation, we can remove this disorder in the patient. However, the most difficult part is to be able to point our "heater gun" accurately at these tissues.

People have been thinking of using machine vision techniques to assist Catheter ablation. Using Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) together with endoscopy we should be able to produce a detailed 3D model of the heart; and especially the heart muscles surrounding the heart. Till December I intend to look at ways of doing this. The first step would be segmenting data-sets and locating the different clusters of data which represent different parts of the heart. Producing a 3D model, after identifying clusters, should be a fairly trivial task. We could use tools such as vtk. Using our 3D model we can explore the muscle tissues as much as we want. It forms the basis of a virtual endoscopy. It is like our test ground where we get to take as many shots as we want. We cannot falter when we take that one shot at the real muscle.