Cardiac right ventricular segmentation via point correspondence

This study presents an approach to the segmentation of the right ventricle (RV) from a sequence of cardiac magnetic resonance (MR) images. Automatic delineation of the RV is difficult because of its complex morphology, thin and ill-defined borders, and the photometric similarities between the connected cardiac regions such as papillary muscles and heart wall. Further, geometric/photometric models are hard to build from a finite training set because of the significant differences in size, shape, and intensity between subjects. In this study, we propose to use a non-rigid registration method developed recently to obtain the point correspondence in a sequence of cine MR images. Given the segmentation on the first frame, the proposed method segments both endocardial and epicardial borders of the RV using the obtained point correspondence, and relaxes the need of a training set. The proposed method is evaluated quantitatively on common data set by comparison with manual segmentation, which demonstrated competitive results in comparison with recent methods.