Segmentation of the left ventricle in cardiac MR images

This paper describes a segmentation technique to automatically extract the myocardium in 4D cardiac MR images for quantitative cardiac analysis and the diagnosis of patients. Three different modules are presented. The automatic localization algorithm is able to approximately locate the left ventricle in an image using a maximum discrimination technique. Then, the local deformation algorithm can deform active contours so that they align to the edges in the image to produce the desired outlining of the myocardium. Finally, the global localization algorithm is able to propagate segmented contours from one image in the data set to all the others. We have experimented with the proposed method on a large number of patients and present some examples to show the strengths and pitfalls of our algorithm.