Coupled B-spline active geometric functions for myocardial segmentation: A localized region-based approach

Although echocardiographic image segmentation has been a hot topic for long and several methods exist for robust endocardial segmentation, little attention has been directed to full myocardial segmentation. In fact, full myocardial segmentation is particularly challenging due to the high heterogeneity in the appearance of the epicardial boundary in US images. In the present paper, we propose an extension to the recently introduced Active Geometric Functions segmentation framework in order to cope with data inhomogeneities. This method has been successfully applied to short axis B-mode images acquired in a clinical setting. The mean absolute distance between the algorithm and the reference contours provided by an expert physician is 2.81±0.7 pixels. The computation time per frame is around 1 second, in a non-optimized MATLAB implementation, which shows that this method can be extended to achieve real time performance.