Noninvasive numerical vivisection of anatomic structure and function of the intact circulatory system using high temporal resolution cylindrical scanning computerized tomography

A high temporal resolution cylindrical scanning computerized tomographic system (DSR) is being built for study of anatomic structural/functional relationships of heart, lungs, vascular anatomy, and circulatory dynamics in any region of the body. Unlike current commercial CT scanners which scan only or, at most, a few cross sections at a time, cylindrical scanners such as the current Mayo SSDSR and upcoming DSR scan nearly 250 cross sections simultaneously. Twenty-eight or more multiplanar images over a range of 160 or more degrees of an entire rapidly moving structure such as the heart or a segment of the circulation will be recorded in periods as short as 10 msec by the DSR at 60/sec rates and stored in computer memory. The scanned volumes can then be sectioned mathematically in any direction at will, including zooming in on regions of interest to problems at hand (e.g., clinical diagnoses). Progression from biomedical investigation to practical clinical and health care uses requires development of special-purpose, readily replicable, economical (but very high speed and volume) data handling and computational devices. The ultimate overall objective is to quantitatively characterize the performance of the human cardiopulmonary and circulatory systems utilizing perturbations associated with various types of physiologic stress and congenital or acquired disease processes including neoplasia.