Automatic Detection of Ostia in the Left Atrium

Atrial fibrillation is a wide spread heart arrhythmia that can be treated by catheter ablation. This procedure may involve a planning step which can be performed based on a 3-D model of the patient’s left atrium (LA) segmented from a CT or MRI volume. One of the first decisions to make during treatment is whether to use a single-shot device or a radio-frequency catheter. This decision is based on the size of pulmonary vein ostium and the ablation path as defined by ablation lines. Recently a method for automatic annotation of ablation lines was proposed. It is based on the position of the pulmonary (PV) vein ostia of a left atrium. To facilitate a fully automatic approach, we present a novel learningbased method based on mesh skeletonization that automatically detects pulmonary vein ostium positions in a 3-D LA model. In our evaluation, we found a success rate of 86% and an average error of 4.3±2.6mm.