Abstract. In this paper, a statistical atlas of DT-MRIs based on a population of nine ex vivo normal canine hearts is compared with a human cardiac DT-MRI and a commonly used synthetic model of the fibre orientation. The aim of this paper is to perform an statistical inter-species comparison of the cardiac fibre architecture and to assess the quality of a synthetic description of the fibre orientation. First, we present the framework to build a statistical atlas of cardiac DT-MRIs providing a mean and a covariance of diffusion tensors at each voxel of an average geometry. According to the registration steps of this framework, we register the human and synthetic data on the statistical atlas. Finally, for each eigenvectors of the diffusion tensors, we compute the angular difference with the average atlas and its Mahalanobis distance to the canine population. The results show a better consistence of the fibre orientation than the laminar sheet orientation between the human and the...