A data-driven approach to prior extraction for segmentation of left ventricle in cardiac MR images

In this paper, we propose a data-driven approach that extracts prior information for segmentation of the left ventricle in cardiac MR images of transplanted rat hearts. In our approach, probabilistic priors are generated from prominent features, i.e., corner points and scale-invariant edges, for both endo- and epi-cardium segmentation. We adopt a level set formulation that integrates probabilistic priors with intensity, texture, and edge information for segmentation. Our experimental results show that with minimal user input, representative priors are correctly extracted from the data itself, and the proposed method is effective and robust for segmentation of the left ventricle myocardium even in images with very low contrast. More importantly, it avoids inter- and intra- observer variations and makes accurate quantitative analysis of low-quality cardiac MR images possible.