Cardiac fiber architecture plays an important role in the study of mechanical and electrical properties of the wall of the human heart, but still remains to be elucidated. This paper proposes to investigate, in a multiscale manner, how the arrangement patterns and morphological heterogeneity of cardiac myocytes influence the fibers orientation. To this end, different virtual cardiac fiber structures are modeled, and diffusion tensor imaging at multiple scales are simulated using the Monte Carlo method. The results show that the proposed modeling and simulation allow us to quantitatively describe the variation of the measured tissue properties (fiber orientation and fractional anisotropy) as a function of the observation scale.
© 2011 IEEE