Contour detection of short axis slice MR images for contraction irregularity assessment

A new method for automatically detecting left ventricular endocardial borders in cardiac MRI short-axis slices was applied to a previously published patient group for which manually drawn contours already existed. An initial point lying in the left ventricular endocardium was found by a size invariant circular Hough transform. A coarse segmentation of the endocardial region was completed by merging surrounding regions and building the convex hull. Adjacent time frames were used to remove jitter from the contour movements. A feature (IRM), extracted from those contours, quantified the irregularities of left ventricular contractions. Patients with dilated cardiomyopathy were separated from the control group by thresholding the IRM parameter