Effective orifice area measurement of artificial heart valve based on image processing

Artificial heart valves must be tested and evaluated by in vitro hemodynamic performance from development to clinical application. Effective orifice area(EOA) is one of the important indicators. At present, EOA measurement method mainly relies on manually depicting the contour of the valve opening and calculating it by software. In this paper, a method for measuring the EOA of the artificial heart valve based on image processing is proposed to improve the measurement efficiency of the EOA of the artificial heart valve and solve the problem of low automation and high manual intervention of the traditional method. The morphological image processing can effectively remove the bright noise of the stainless steel bracket and the orifice shaded portion; the region growing algorithm can well segment the open shadow portion. The results show that the method can accurately measure the EOA of artificial heart valves of different specifications, and provide data support for analyzing the relationship between opening area, flow rate and transvalvular pressure difference.