In this work we describe the usage of bilinear statistical models as a means of factoring the shape variability into two components attributed to inter-subject variation and to the intrinsic dynamics of the human heart. We show that it is feasible to reconstruct the shape of the heart at discrete points in the cardiac cycle. Provided we are given a small number of shape instances representing the same heart at/ndifferent points in the same cycle, we can use the bilinear/nmodel to establish this. Using a temporal and a spatial alignment step in the preprocessing of the shapes, around half of the reconstruction errors were on the order of the axial image resolution of 2 mm, and over 90% was within 3.5 mm. From this, we/nconclude that the dynamics were indeed separated from the/ninter-subject variability in our dataset.

The work of A.F.F. was supported by the Spanish Ministry of Education and Science under a Ramon y Cajal Research Fellowship. This work was partially developed within the framework of the CENIT-CDTEAM Project funded by the Spanish CDTI-MITYC, and also partially supported by grants MEC TEC2006-03617/TCM and ISCIII FIS2004/40676.