Extraction of Myocardial Fibrosis Using Iterative Active Shape Method

The article deals with complex analysis of myocardial fibrosis. In clinical practice, myocardial fibrosis is commonly examined by MRI. This kind of disease is commonly assessed by human eyes. There isn’t any diagnostic software alternative for evaluation of myocardial fibrosis features. The proposed method partially solves this problem. The main intention is automatic extraction of fibrosis area. This area is represented by closed curve which reflects shape of analyzed object. At the beginning of algorithm, initial circle is set on the fibrosis area. In iterative steps, this circle adopts shape of pathologic lesion. Before execution of segmentation process it is needed to specify region of interest (RoI) and image preprocessing which comprises especially low pass filtration. Filtration process suppresses unwanted adjacent objects. This step is quite important because active shape method could spread out of fibrosis borders and resulting curve has wouldn’t reflect real shape of myocardial fibrosis.