Design and development of an automated approach for the analysis of pulmonary veins' contraction in patients diagnosed with atrial fibrillation

Atrial fibrillation (AF) is a clinically significant cardiac rhythm disorder likely caused by an unexpected arrhythmogenic activity in the pulmonary veins’ (PVs) myocardial sleeves. Determining and analyzing the PVs’ contraction is critical. This dissertation aims to develop an automated approach to aid the analysis of PVs’ contraction by providing insight into what happens in the venous cavity as the focus is moved distally up the vein. Starting from patients’ CT scans, 3D atrial meshes are obtained and then processed to extract 10 mm-long cylinder-shaped portions of the vein, which are then used to evaluate PVs’ area and volume variations over a cardiac cycle. Data are processed in the MATLAB environment. Even though any consideration must be considered speculative at this point due to additional requirements during the acceptance phase of participants which drastically reduced the size of the population, results show superior PVs have more relevant area and volume variations than inferior PVs do. The left inferior PV’s area variation exhibits an unexpected trend at the ostium level, which might be due to a more considerable backflow than the presumed one; this phenomenon exhausts quickly as it cannot be appreciated anymore in the analysis of more distal portions of the vein. These results validate the importance of developing an approach that can offer ways to study and analyze the PVs’ behavior as distance increases from the left atrium-PV junction; they also highlight the need for future studies to consolidate these primary results.