Edge detection in gated cardiac nuclear medicine images

Mean field annealing using a piecewise linear model was applied to gated cardiac nuclear medicine images as a preprocessing tool for image smoothing and noise reduction. A second derivative operator was then used to extract the edges for ventricle boundary estimation. Combined with the user input initial boundary estimate, the extracted edge information was used to find a minimum cost boundary, which was optimum with regards to boundary smoothness and the boundary edge strength.<<ETX>>