Quantitative functional analysis of the left ventricle plays a very important role in the diagnosis of heart diseases. While in standard two-dimensional echocardiography this quantification is limited to rather crude volume estimation, three-dimensional (3-D) echocardiography not only significantly improves its accuracy but also makes it possible to derive valuable additional information, like various wall-motion measurements. In this paper, we present a new efficient method for the functional evaluation of the left ventricle from 3-D echographic sequences. It comprises a segmentation step that is based on the integration of 3-D deformable surfaces and a four-dimensional statistical heart motion model. The segmentation results in an accurate 3-D + time left ventricle discrete representation. Functional descriptors like local wall-motion indexes are automatically derived from this representation. The method has been successfully tested both on electrocardiography-gated and real-time 3-D data. It has proven to be fast, accurate, and robust.
We propose a novel automatic method to segment the myocardium on late-enhancement cardiac MR (LE CMR) images with a multi-step approach. First, in each slice of the LE CMR volume, a geometrical template is deformed so that its borders fit the myocardial contours. The second step consists in introducing a shape prior of the left ventricle. To do so, we use the cine MR sequence that is acquired along with the LE CMR volume. As the myocardial contours can be more easily automatically obtained on this data, they are used to build a 3D mesh representing the left ventricle geometry and the underlying myocardium thickness. This mesh is registered towards the contours obtained with the geometrical template, then locally adjusted to guarantee that scars are included inside the final segmentation. The quantitative evaluation on 27 volumes (272 slices) shows robust and accurate results.
This paper presents a new method for deformable model-based segmentation of lumen and thrombus in abdominal aortic aneurysms from computed tomography (CT) angiography (CTA) scans. First the lumen is segmented based on two positions indicated by the user, and subsequently the resulting surface is used to initialize the automated thrombus segmentation method. For the lumen, the image-derived deformation term is based on a simple grey level model (two thresholds). For the more complex problem of thrombus segmentation, a grey level modeling approach with a nonparametric pattern classification technique is used, namely k-nearest neighbors. The intensity profile sampled along the surface normal is used as classification feature. Manual segmentations are used for training the classifier: samples are collected inside, outside, and at the given boundary positions. The deformation is steered by the most likely class corresponding to the intensity profile at each vertex on the surface. A parameter optimization study is conducted, followed by experiments to assess the overall segmentation quality and the robustness of results against variation in user input. Results obtained in a study of 17 patients show that the agreement with respect to manual segmentations is comparable to previous values reported in the literature, with considerable less user interaction.
Abstract. A typical Cardiac Magnetic Resonance (CMR) examination includes acquisition of a sequence of short-axis (SA) and long-axis (LA) images covering the cardiac cycle. Quantitative analysis of the heart function requires segmentation of the left ventricle (LV) SA images, while segmented LA views allow more accurate estimation of the basal slice and can be used for slice registration. Since manual segmentation of CMR images is very tedious and time-consuming, its automation is highly required. In this paper, we propose a fully automatic 2D method for segmenting LV consecutively in LA and SA images. The approach was validated on 35 patients giving mean segmentation error smaller than one pixel, both for LA and SA, and accurate LV volume measurements.
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