Automatic Segmentation of the Left Ventricle in Cardiac MR and CT Images

This paper describes a segmentation technique to automatically extract the myocardium in 4D cardiac MRand CT datasets. The segmentation algorithm is a two step process. The global localization step roughly localizes the left ventricle using techniques such as maximum discrimination, thresholding and connected component analysis. The local deformations step combines EM-based region segmentation and Dijkstra active contours using graph cuts, spline fitting, or point pattern matching. The technique has been tested on a large number of patients and both quantitative and qualitative results are presented.