Right Ventricle Extraction by Low level and Model-based algorithm

In this paper we present an algorithm as the combination of a low level morphological operation and model based global circular shortest path scheme to explore the segmentation of the right ventricle. Traditional morphological operations were employed to obtain the region of interest, and adjust it to generate a mask. The image cropped by the mask is then partitioned into a few overlapping regions. Global circular shortest path algorithm is then applied to extract the contour from each partition. The final step is to re-assemble the partitions to create the whole contour. The technique is deemed quite reliable and robust, as this is illustrated by a very good agreement between the extracted contour and the expert manual drawing output

[1]  R. Haralick Digital Step Edges from Zero Crossing of Second Directional Derivatives , 1984, IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence.

[2]  Changming Sun,et al.  Circular shortest paths by branch and bound , 2003, Pattern Recognit..

[3]  Ajit Singh,et al.  Cardiac MR image segmentation using deformable models , 1993, Proceedings of Computers in Cardiology Conference.

[4]  Azriel Rosenfeld,et al.  Threshold Evaluation Techniques , 1978, IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics.

[5]  Changming Sun,et al.  Circular shortest path in images , 2003, Pattern Recognit..

[6]  Feng Liu,et al.  A Novel Automated Left Ventricle Segmentation Routine , 2005 .

[7]  Yehoshua Y. Zeevi,et al.  Geodesic Active Contours Applied to Texture Feature Space , 2001, Scale-Space.

[8]  G Bashein,et al.  Matched filter identification of left-ventricular endocardial borders in transesophageal echocardiograms. , 1990, IEEE transactions on medical imaging.

[9]  Demetri Terzopoulos,et al.  Snakes: Active contour models , 2004, International Journal of Computer Vision.

[10]  Surendra Ranganath,et al.  Contour extraction from cardiac MRI studies using snakes , 1995, IEEE Trans. Medical Imaging.

[11]  J A Sethian,et al.  A fast marching level set method for monotonically advancing fronts. , 1996, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America.

[12]  Yongmin Kim,et al.  A multiple active contour model for cardiac boundary detection on echocardiographic sequences , 1996, IEEE Trans. Medical Imaging.