PS-8 Sparse Appearance Model Based Registration and Segmentation of 3D Echocardiographic Images

In this study, active appearance model segmentation and intensity-based image registration were combined for detecting contours in three-dimensional (3D) echocardiograms fully automatically. An appearance model was built in 3D sparsely, consisting of the anatomical 4-chamber, 2-chamber, and short-axis views, which were extracted from end-diastolic 3D data sets. The model was used to segment an unseen image in a registration framework, by optimizing appearance and pose parameters simultaneously. Encouraging results were obtained with leave-one-out experiments on 16 patient data sets. The method may help inter- and intrapatient comparison of images, and is intended as an initialization for a complete 3D segmentation