Vertical coherence applied to SPECT imagery in the 3D reconstruction of the left ventricle

As we already presented in the previous edition of the conference, our algorithm uses SPECT data to automatically recover the three-dimensional shape of the human's left ventricle. The reconstruction of both the internal and external surfaces, allowed us to present the synthetic cardiac cycle for an actual patient and derive its associated ejection fraction estimation. The segmentation module has been improved in order to provide a better and robust border detection and classification. Now the filtering process is based on the maximum-likelihood classification approach (MLC), which rewards an edge depending on its probability to be a part of the left ventricle. The algorithm also takes into account vertical coherence between slices that improves the inputs adding information on the 3D shape. In terms of practical results, we test all these new features against several left-ventricle reconstructions applied to actual pathological hearts.