Left Ventricular Segmentation of 2-D Echocardiographic Image: A Survey

Cardiovascular diseases are a major health concern worldwide. The left ventricle and in particular the endocardium is a structure of particular interest since it performs the task of pumping oxygenated blood to the entire body. Therefore, segmentation of the left ventricle in echocardiography images is a task with important diagnostic power. More concretely, contour extraction is an important criterion for subjective evaluation of the cardiac function and has become an area of focus. Cardiac function is evaluated quantitatively using echocardiography via the analysis of shape attributes, such as the heart wall thickness or the shape change of the heart wall boundaries. This requires that the complete boundaries of the heart wall be detected from a sequence of two-dimensional ultrasonic images of the heart. The image segmentation process is made difficult since these images are plagued by poor intensity contrast and dropouts caused by the intrinsic limitations of the image formation process. Current studies often require the tedious and time-consuming practice of having trained operators manually trace the heart walls. This paper reviews Left ventricular segmentation methods of 2-D echocardiographic image, in a broad sense.