Digital Boundary Detection Techniques For The Analysis Of Gated Cardiac Scintigrams

Boundary detection in conventional nuclear medicine scintigrams is often difficult for several reasons. First, scintigrams generally have a low signal-to-noise ratio. Second, edge structures are poorly defined because of the low resolution of gamma ray cameras; and finally, edge contrast is usually reduced by foreground and background activity. In this paper we report on heuristic approaches we have taken to solve these problems and to develop programs for the display of cardiac wall motion and for the automatic determination of left ventricular ejection fraction. Our approach to processing cardiac scintigrams entails several steps: smoothing, edge enhancement, and contour extraction. We discuss each of these steps in light of the goal of producing cardiac boundaries which are spatially and temporally smooth and continuous. Boundary detection results are presented for some selected clinical images.