Personalized 4D Whole-Heart Mesh Reconstruction from Cine MRI via Multi-Scale Temporal Modeling and Differentiable Contour Rendering

2026-07-02

AI Summary

This study addresses the challenges of reconstructing four-dimensional whole-heart meshes from sparse two-dimensional cine MRI for building cardiac digital twins, particularly limited slice coverage and the strong coupling between cardiac morphology and motion. To this end, the authors propose an end-to-end image-to-mesh mapping framework that integrates multi-scale temporal modeling to capture both global dynamics across the cardiac cycle and local inter-frame consistency. The method further incorporates a differentiable silhouette renderer grounded in the Beer–Lambert law to enable anatomy-aware supervision. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed approach achieves a mean absolute error of 1.68 ± 0.31 mm in whole-heart reconstruction and reduces motion jitter to as low as 0.77 ± 0.17 mm/frame³, outperforming existing methods while supporting multi-view contour alignment and validation through electrophysiological simulation.

Abstract

Accurate 4D whole-heart mesh reconstruction from sparse cine MRI is critical for creating cardiac digital twins, but remains challenging due to limited 2D slice coverage and the complex coupling between cardiac shape and motion. Existing methods often rely on intermediate contour fitting and typically reconstruct static, single-phase, or partial cardiac geometries, limiting their ability to capture full-chamber dynamics. We propose a novel end-to-end framework for reconstructing temporally resolved whole-heart meshes from multi-view 2D cine MRI sequences by learning an image-to-mesh mapping. The framework incorporates a differentiable contour renderer inspired by the Beer-Lambert attenuation principle, enabling anatomy-aware supervision of 3D+t mesh deformation through contour-based projection losses. To improve temporal consistency across the cardiac cycle, we further introduce a multi-scale temporal modeling module that integrates global cycle-level dynamics with local inter-frame coherence to generate smooth and physiologically plausible mesh trajectories. The proposed method achieved a whole-heart mean absolute error of 1.68 $\pm$ 0.31 mm and a motion jitter of 0.77 $\pm$ 0.17 $\mathrm{mm}/\mathrm{frame}^{3}$, outperforming existing methods with lower reconstruction error and substantially improved motion smoothness. It also improved 2D contour alignment across multiple cine MRI views and supported downstream proof-of-concept electrophysiological simulation. The code will be released publicly upon acceptance of the manuscript for publication.

Problem

• 4D whole-heart reconstruction
• cine MRI
• cardiac digital twin
• mesh deformation
• temporal consistency

Innovation

• differentiable contour rendering
• multi-scale temporal modeling
• 4D whole-heart mesh reconstruction
• image-to-mesh mapping
• cardiac digital twin