IMPLEMENTATION OF A DATABASE-DRIVEN ANALYSIS PLATFORM FOR THE EXPLORATION OF MYOCARDIAL FIBER ARCHITECTURE OBTAINED VIA DIFFUSION TENSOR MAGNETIC RESONANCE IMAGING

ii Cardiovascular disease (CVD) affects millions of people in the world. Despite steadily improving diagnosis and treatment techniques, CVD remains the leading cause of death in the United States. Diseases of the heart have been shown to affect both the electrical and mechanical subsystems of the organ at the cellular level. The structure and function of the heart are intimately entwined. Consequently, comprehensive understanding of the underlying cardiac muscle fiber structure is essential to truly understanding the pathology of disease states. The effectiveness of diffusion tensor magnetic resonance imaging (DTMRI) for deriving cardiac muscle fiber orientation has been validated by several researchers. DTMRI provides three distinct advantages over histological methods for obtaining myocardial fiber structure. First, DTMRI yields estimates of the absolute orientation of cardiac fibers, whereas current histological methods yield estimates only of fiber inclination angle. Second, DTMRI provides estimates of fiber orientation at more than one order of magnitude more points than ha