This paper investigates automatic construction of a three-dimensional (3D) heart model from 4D medical images. It provides reliable functional analysis of human hearts for diagnosis and treatment for cardiovascular diseases. Firstly

a 4D image is constructed from a set of medical images that are obtained at a sequence of time points. Then

based on a statistical shape model trained from thousands of patient image sets

a geometrical and statistical heart model is generated. With this model

for a new case

an adaptive segmentation and fitting scheme is used to obtain its 3D flexible shape which is interpreted as the deformable surfaces of the patient heart. Finally

functional evaluation of the cardiac ventricles can be followed by quantitative analysis of some important parameters

such as volumetric measurements

myocardial dynamics

and disease analysis. Experiments are carried out to demonstrate the proposed method. The study provides an important means of diagnosis and treatment for heart diseases.