Automatic 2D Segmentation of an Intracardiac Catheter Based on MSER Blob Detector and Eccentricity

The present study describes an algorithm for automatic catheter detection and segmentation based on echocardiography data. The catheter area was recognized and then delineated by combination of detection and segmentation techniques such as the maximally stable extremal regions (MSER) algorithm, feature analysis and Kittler-Illingworth thresholding algorithm. Regions processed by MSER detector were restricted by eccentricity. Eccentricity, assessing the shape of the particular region, was chosen as the main feature. Morphological closing was applied at the pre-processing step. After applying MSER blob detector, detection accuracy of the catheter made up 86.7±11.5%. After performing an additional restriction based on the shape analysis, the accuracy increased to 92.8±6.6%. The proposed algorithm allows performing automatic detection and segmentation of the catheter inside the heart based on 2D echocardiography data.