Segmentation of Left Ventricle of 2D Echocardiographic Image Using Active Contouring

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 echocardiographic images is a task with important diagnostic power. 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. This paper describes a method for obtaining the border of the heart´s left ventricle which is useful in the detection of certain heart parameters. The limitation of speckle noise is overcome by smoothening the image using Gaussian filtering.