SDF4CHD: Generative Modeling of Cardiac Anatomies with Congenital Heart Defects

Abstract: Congenital heart disease (CHD) encompasses a spectrum of cardiovascular structural abnormalities, often requiring customized treatment plans for individual patients. Computational modeling and analysis of these unique cardiac anatomies can improve diagnosis and treatment planning and may ultimately lead to improved outcomes. Deep learning (DL) methods have demonstrated the potential to enable efficient treatment planning by automating cardiac segmentation and mesh construction for patients with normal cardiac anatomies. However, CHDs are often rare, making it challenging to acquire sufficiently large patient cohorts for training such DL models. Generative modeling of cardiac anatomies has the potential to fill this gap via the generation of virtual cohorts; however, prior approaches were largely designed for normal anatomies and cannot readily capture the significant topological variations seen in CHD patients. Therefore, we propose a type- and shape-disentangled generative approach suitable to capture the wide spectrum of cardiac anatomies observed in different CHD types and synthesize differently shaped cardiac anatomies that preserve the unique topology for specific CHD types. Our DL approach represents generic whole heart anatomies with CHD type-specific abnormalities implicitly using signed distance fields (SDF) based on CHD type diagnosis, which conveniently captures divergent anatomical variations across different types and represents meaningful intermediate CHD states. To capture the shape-specific variations, we then learn invertible deformations to morph the learned CHD type-specific anatomies and reconstruct patient-specific shapes. Our approach has the potential to augment the image-segmentation pairs for rarer CHD types for cardiac segmentation and generate cohorts of CHD cardiac meshes for computational simulation.