Computer-based measurement of right and left ventricular volumes in magnetic resonance imaging

An accurate and efficient method for automated measurement of right and left ventricular volumes in magnetic resonance imaging is proposed. The method can be divided into four major stages. They are preprocessing, adaptive thresholding, 2-dimensional boundary extraction, and 3-dimensional display and volume calculation. A simulation study using a generated sphere with known dimension and an anatomic specimen study using two excised pig hearts were performed to validate the accuracy of our algorithm for computerized measurement, followed by a clinical study of 3 healthy-volunteer hearts. The measurement results were compared to that obtained with manual tracing by two human experts. Our preliminary results show that the proposed method provides acceptable accuracy and is clinically applicable