Automatic extraction of the mitral valve chordae geometry for biomechanical simulation

Purpose Mitral valve computational models are widely studied in the literature. They can be used for preoperative planning or anatomical understanding. Manual extraction of the valve geometry on medical images is tedious and requires special training, while automatic segmentation is still an open problem. Methods We propose here a fully automatic pipeline to extract the valve chordae architecture compatible with a computational model. First, an initial segmentation is obtained by sub-mesh topology analysis and RANSAC-like model-fitting procedure. Then, the chordal structure is optimized with respect to objective functions based on mechanical, anatomical, and image-based considerations. Results The approach has been validated on 5 micro-CT scans with a graph-based metric and has shown an 87.5% accuracy rate. The method has also been tested within a structural simulation of the mitral valve closed state. Conclusion Our results show that the chordae architecture resulting from our algorithm can give results similar to experienced users while providing an equivalent biomechanical simulation.