Cardiac Digital Twins at Scale from MRI: Open Tools and Representative Models from ~55000 UK Biobank Participants
Journal:
arXiv
Published Date:
May 27, 2025
Abstract
A cardiac digital twin is a virtual replica of a patient's heart for
screening, diagnosis, prognosis, risk assessment, and treatment planning of
cardiovascular diseases. This requires an anatomically accurate
patient-specific 3D structural representation of the heart, suitable for
electro-mechanical simulations or study of disease mechanisms. However,
generation of cardiac digital twins at scale is demanding and there are no
public repositories of models across demographic groups. We describe an
automatic open-source pipeline for creating patient-specific left and right
ventricular meshes from cardiovascular magnetic resonance images, its
application to a large cohort of ~55000 participants from UK Biobank, and the
construction of the most comprehensive cohort of adult heart models to date,
comprising 1423 representative meshes across sex (male, female), body mass
index (range: 16 - 42 kg/m$^2$) and age (range: 49 - 80 years). Our code is
available at https://github.com/cdttk/biv-volumetric-meshing/tree/plos2025 ,
and pre-trained networks, representative volumetric meshes with fibers and UVCs
will be made available soon.
