Cardiac ultrasound plays an important role in the imaging of hearts in basic cardiovascular research and clinical examinations. 3D ultrasound imaging can provide the geometry or motion information of the heart. Especially, the wrapping of cardiac fiber orientations to the ultrasound volume could supply useful information on the stress distributions and electric action spreading. However, how to acquire 3D ultrasound volumes of the heart of small animals in vivo for cardiac fiber wrapping is still a challenging problem. In this study, we provide an approach to acquire 3D ultrasound volumes of the rat hearts in vivo. The comparison between both in vivo and ex vivo geometries indicated 90.1% Dice similarity. In this preliminary study, the evaluations of the cardiac fiber orientation wrapping errors were 24.7° for the acute angle error and were 22.4° for the inclination angle error. This 3D ultrasound imaging and fiber orientation estimation technique have potential applications in cardiac imaging.
Keywords: In vivo 3D ultrasound imaging; cardiac fiber orientations; cardiac imaging; echocardiography; magnetic resonance diffusion tensor imaging (MR-DTI); small animal imaging.