Automatic LV volume measurement in low dose multi-phase CT by shape tracking

Abstract

Functional assessment of cardiac ventricular function requires time consuming manual interaction. Some automated methods have been presented that predominantly used cardiac magnet resonance images. Here, an automatic shape tracking approach is followed to estimate left ventricular blood volume from multi-slice computed tomography image series acquired with retrospective ECG-gating. A deformable surface model method was chosen that utilized both shape and local appearance priors to determine the endocardial surface and to follow its motion through the cardiac cycle. Functional parameters like the ejection fraction could be calculated from the estimated shape deformation. A clinical validation was performed in a porcine model with 60 examinations on eight subjects. The functional parameters showed a good correlation with those determined by clinical experts using a commercially available semi-automatic short axes delineation tool. The correlation coefficient for the ejection fraction (EF) was 0.89. One quarter of these acquisitions were done with a low dose protocol. All of these degraded images could be processed well. Their correlation slightly decreases when compared to the normal dose cases (EF: 0.87 versus 0.88).