Fast 3D echocardiographic segmentation using B-Spline Explicit Active Surfaces: A validation study in a clinical setting

Real-time 3D echocardiography (RT3DE) has already been shown to be an accurate tool for left ventricular (LV) volume assessment. We have recently developed a 3D automated segmentation framework (BEAS) able to capture the LV morphology in real-time, which reduces the analysis time and facilitates the use of RT3DE for LV volume quantification in clinical routine. BEAS was tested using 24 RT3DE sequences of both healthy individuals and patients with a multitude of pathologies including myocardial infarction and dilated cardiomyopathy with severely distorted LV geometry. The results show that this algorithm provides a fast and accurate quantification of 3D cardiac volumes with minimal user interaction.