Anatomy-Aligned Surface Field Learning for Myocardial Reconstruction from Sparse Short-Axis Cine MRI

Patient-specific 4D myocardial reconstruction from cine MRI supports quantitative functional assessment, regional motion analysis, and simulation-based modeling. However, routinely acquired short-axis (SAX) cine MRI is sparsely sampled along the through-plane direction, making dense and anatomically consistent surface reconstruction challenging. In this study, we propose an anatomy-aligned surface learning framework that parameterizes the epicardial and endocardial surfaces on a shared circumferential-longitudinal UV domain. This formulation converts irregular 3D reconstruction into structured coordinate-field completion with explicit correspondence across subjects and cardiac phases. Sparse SAX contours are encoded as UV observation fields, coverage-aware sampling improves robustness to incomplete slice coverage, and topology- and distortion-aware learning preserves circumferential continuity and local surface quality. Experiments on three public cine MRI datasets showed that the proposed method consistently outperformed representative mesh-based and implicit reconstruction approaches, achieving overall Chamfer distances of 2.887~mm on ACDC, 2.641~mm on M&Ms, and 2.810~mm on M&Ms-2. The reconstructed sequences also preserved ventricular function, with end-diastolic volume and ejection fraction errors of 3.3~mL and 1.1 %, respectively. These results demonstrate that anatomy-aligned UV learning provides an accurate, efficient, and correspondence-aware representation for sparse cine MRI reconstruction and myocardial modeling. The source code will be available at https://github.com/yuan-xiaohan/SAX2MyoSurf.