Sequential cardiac segmentation by seed contour tracking

A sequential cardiac segmentation method based on an active contour model, initial seed contour tracking (SCT) scheme, and phase contrast magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) has been developed to improve the accuracy of automatic sequential segmentation of the myocardial boundaries, especially the endocardial boundary. The performance of the proposed method was assessed by experiments performed on phase contrast MRI data sets from three normal human volunteers. Experimental results showed that the propagation of errors caused by improper positioning of initial seed contours in sequential cardiac segmentation was reduced significantly by the use of the SCT scheme.