DTI Phenomapping of the Human Heart In Vivo and Ex Vivo

Motivation: We sought to validate our approach of acquiring and characterizing myocardial microstructure through voxel-scale phenomapping of the human heart in vivo. Goal(s): Our goal was to validate our approach using a high-quality ex vivo data set. Approach: We used the voxels from diffusion tensor MRI scans of human hearts ex vivo and characterized the resulting phenomapping matrices. Results: The in vivo and ex vivo hearts showed comparable helix angle derived metrics and presented similar trends for principal component analysis and k-means clustering. Impact: DTI phenomapping of the human in vivo and ex vivo yielded near identical results, validating the accuracy of the technique to characterize myocardial microstructure.