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Left ventricular myocardium segmentation on delayed phase of multi-detector row computed tomography

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International Journal of Computer Assisted Radiology and Surgery Aims and scope Submit manuscript

Abstract

Rationale and objectives

Advanced ischemic heart disease is usually accompanied by left ventricular (LV) myocardial volume loss and an abnormal enhancing pattern on delayed phase of multi-detector row computed tomography (MDCT). To assist radiologists and physicians in estimating the LV myocardial volume on delayed phase, this paper proposes an adaptive segmentation method for contouring the myocardial region in the delayed-phase MDCT and for computing the volume.

Materials and methods

The proposed method uses an anisotropic diffusion filter as a preprocessing procedure to enhance contrast and reduce specks in MDCT imaging. This work picks the middle of mid-ventricular level image slices as the lead slice. The proposed method develops two contouring modes to sketch the myocardium contour on the lead slice. By establishing the obtained contours as the initial contours, the region-growing method is employed to identify the contour of the myocardial region for each slice. The convex-hull finding algorithm is then used to refine the extracted contour. Finally, the width properties of the myocardial region and the morphological operators are used to obtain the entire LV myocardial volume.

Results

Twenty-seven healthy patients who had no symptoms of ischemic heart disease are examined to evaluate the performance of the proposed method. Compared with manual contours delineated by two experienced experts, the contouring results using computer simulation reveal that the proposed method reliably identifies contours similar to those obtained using manual sketching.

Conclusion

The proposed method provides robust contouring for the LV myocardium on delayed-phase MDCT. The potential role of this technique may substantially reduce the time required to sketch manually a precise contour with high stability.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Radiology, Taichung Veterans General Hospital, Taichung, Taiwan

    I-Chen Tsai & Min-Chi Chen

  2. Institute of Clinical Medicine and Faculty of Medicine, National Yang Ming University, Taipei, Taiwan

    I-Chen Tsai

  3. Department of Medical Imaging, Show Chwan Memorial Hospital and Chang Bing Show Chwan Memorial Hospital, Changhua, Taiwan

    I-Chen Tsai

  4. Department of Computer Science, Tunghai University, Taichung, 407, Taiwan

    Yu-Len Huang & Po-Ting Liu

Authors
  1. I-Chen Tsai
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  2. Yu-Len Huang
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  3. Po-Ting Liu
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  4. Min-Chi Chen
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Yu-Len Huang.

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Tsai, IC., Huang, YL., Liu, PT. et al. Left ventricular myocardium segmentation on delayed phase of multi-detector row computed tomography. Int J CARS 7, 737–751 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11548-012-0688-3

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11548-012-0688-3

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