Currently, minimally invasive cardiac surgery (MICS) faces several limitations, including inadequate training methods using non-realistic models, insufficient surgery planning using 2D images, and the lack of global, 3D guidance during the procedure. To address these issues we are developing the Virtual Cardiac Surgery Platform (VCSP) – a virtual reality model of the patient specific thorax, derived from pre-procedural images. Here we present an image registration-based method for customizing a geometrical template model of the heart to any given patient, and validate it using manual segmentation as the gold standard. On average, the process is accurate to within 3.3 ± 0.3 mm in MR images, and 2.4 ± 0.3 mm in CT images. These results