The Cardiac Atlas Project is committed to establish a web accessible structural and functional atlas of the normal and pathological heart for clinical, research and educational purposes. An initial goal of the project is to facilitate statistical analysis across population groups of regional heart shape and wall motion characteristics, via the application of parametric mathematical modeling tools. 

Three main CAP research objectives:

  1. To establish a database of cardiac MR examinations and to develop the necessary infrastructure and protocols. To date, the database has been populated with cardiac data and derived functional analyses from different studies, including the Multi-Ethnic Study of Atherosclerosis (MESA) study (>2,500 cases), and the DEfibrillators to REduce Risk by Magnetic Resonance ImagiNg Evaluation (DETERMINE) study (>400 cases).
  2. To develop standardized procedures for the contribution, curation, archival, classification, and sharing of CMR data and derived analyses, compatible with existing tools.
  3. To provide open source software for the mapping and analysis of cardiac morphometry, with particular regard to spatio-temporal characteristics of regional heart wall motion.

Apart from internal CAP research projects, there are now active external research projects that utilize the cardiac MR images and derived functional analyses from the CAP database. New research projects can be proposed by requesting access to the CAP data.

One particular research project that the CAP team is actively organising with many research institutions worldwide is a collaboration work to create a consensus ground truth images for the left ventricular heart. This project will eventually create a benchmark data for any researchers in the field of automatic segmentation of cardiac images as the most reliable reference. We are currently seeking participations from any researchers or students to join this work.