Extracting endocardial borders from sequential echocardiographic images

The authors discuss using mathematical morphology and temporal information (TI) to improve contour accuracy in the segmentation of 2D echo images. When the input consists of a sequence of images with poor quality, TI is used to assist the contour-extraction process. Spatial information of the contour in Frame i-1 is combined with the initial contour in Frame i to give a better estimation of the initial contour in Frame i. The results indicate that adding TI improves the accuracy of the generated contour, especially when the image quality is poor. The additional process does not affect the efficiency of the algorithm.