Left atrial shape changes

I have come across scores of works which investigate the ventricular volume changes during the cardiac cycle. It has important applications, and is primarily used to quantitatively assess functional parameters such as wall motion, wall thickness and ejection fraction. Considering the fact that the ventricle changes shape, it is not unusual to expect the left atrium to also change its shape. The systole (when the heart contracts) and diastole (when the heart relaxes) are evident in all the four components of the heart. Little work has been done to investigate the atrial volume, and the only piece of work I could find is this. The authors investigate the changes in left-atrial volume in healthy children using 3D Echocardiography.

The changes in left atrial volume can have implications in RF ablation surgery. H. Zhong et. al. describes the RF surgery well in here by comparing it to a painter trying to paint a wall (left atrial endocardium) with his brush (catheter). Assuming that the painter has made an impression of what he is going to paint before hand, on a piece of paper. If the wall started moving, it would be quite trivial to paint it if the painter's motion and the wall's motion are registered (finding a one-to-one correspondence) , along with that of his impression. The hurdle is to be able to solve this correspondence problem and register our 4D model of the atrium with that of the acquired MRI/CTs. H. Zhong et. al. attempts to solve this in their work.

The MRI datasets came in just today, and I will be looking at more atrium segmentation (for training data) in the coming week.