Supertoroid-Based Characterization of Cardiac Diffusion Tensor Fields

Choukri Mekkaoui¹, Marcel P. Jackowski², Albert J. Sinusas¹

The aim of this study is to introduce a novel supertoroid-based representation of the diffusion tensor fields to improve myofiber visualization. The supertoroids address the limitations of the superquadrics and toroidal glyphs, by unifying the specific advantages of each representation. Supertoroids incorporate the visual features conveyed by the increase in genus inherent to the toroids and a continuum that fully encodes the local eigensystem intrinsic to the superquadrics. The methodology was applied on DT-MRI datasets of a normal and infarcted canine hearts. Results indicate that supertoroids enhance cardiac myofiber structure characterization compared to ellipsoidal, superquadrics and toroids.