Maurer-cartan forms for fields on surfaces: application to heart fiber geometry

Research output: Contribution to journalJournal articlepeer-review

We study the space of first order models of smooth frame fields using the method of moving frames. By exploiting the Maurer-Cartan matrix of connection forms we develop geometrical embeddings for frame fields which lie on spherical, ellipsoidal and generalized helicoid surfaces. We design methods for optimizing connection forms in local neighborhoods and apply these to a statistical analysis of heart fiber geometry, using diffusion magnetic resonance imaging. This application of moving frames corroborates and extends recent characterizations of muscle fiber orientation in the heart wall, but also provides for a rich geometrical interpretation. In particular, we can now obtain direct local measurements of the variation of the helix and transverse angles, of fiber fanning and twisting, and of the curvatures of the heart wall in which these fibers lie.
Original languageEnglish
JournalIEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence
Volume37
Issue number12
Pages (from-to)2492-2504
Number of pages13
ISSN0162-8828
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 2015

ID: 130885426