Transtexture based segmentation of echocardiographic images

Echocardiography is the predominant technique for quantitative assessment of cardiac function. This paper presents a new approach for segmenting echocardiographic images using fuzzy logic and texture properties. In echocardiographic images, the transition between blood pool and myocardium is significant. This transition reflects as variations in texture properties. Our method incorporates the transition characteristics and texture properties of echo images (transtexture) for boundary tracking. The texture properties such as energy and homogeneity are given as input for the fuzzy system, and output is the segmented image. Integration of texture properties and fuzzy logic makes the delineation robust, effective and overcomes the edge ambiguities in delineating left ventricle. Experimental results show that, integration of texture properties with fuzzy logic gives 95.8% of acceptance level for segmented left ventricle in echocardiographic images when compared with expert drawn curve.