Cardiac segmentation in MR cine data using inverse consistent deformable registration

This paper proposes a registration-based segmentation technique to fully automatically segment the left ventricle in cardiac cine magnetic resonance studies. We propose an inverse consistent deformable registration algorithm to recover one set of forward and backward deformation fields that allow us to access the deformation from any frame to any other frame in the cardiac sequence. Cardiac phases are segmented using a shortest path algorithm and time consistency is enforced through the deformation fields. We demonstrate on 52 datasets with expert outlined ground truth that the algorithm produces accurate (1.39 pixels median error, 2.10 pixels RMS error, 0.88 Dice coefficient) and fast (0.3 s/image) results.