Date: 18 January 2024
Time: 12:30-13:30
Location: LSE Data Science Institute, COL 1.06 First Floor Columbia House, 202 Houghton St, London WC2A 2AE

Speaker: Dr Wenjia Bai 

Generative modelling of cardiac anatomy

Abstract: Two key questions in cardiac image analysis are to assess the anatomy and motion of the heart from images; and to understand how they are associated with non-imaging clinical factors such as gender, age and diseases. While the first question can often be addressed by image segmentation and motion tracking algorithms, our capability to model and answer the second question is still limited. Here, we propose a novel conditional generative model to describe the 4D spatio-temporal anatomy of the heart and its interaction with non-imaging clinical factors. The clinical factors are integrated as the conditions of the generative modelling, which allows us to investigate how these factors influence the cardiac anatomy. We evaluate the model performance in mainly two tasks, anatomical sequence completion and sequence generation. The model achieves high performance in anatomical sequence completion, comparable to or outperforming other state-of-the-art generative models. In terms of sequence generation, given clinical conditions, the model can generate realistic synthetic 4D sequential anatomies that share similar distributions with the real data.

Unsolved problems: How can we develop a personalised normative model for human anatomy? How do we show its clinical usefulness?