Authors:
Malik Saad Sultan
1
;
2
;
Nelson Martins
1
;
2
;
3
;
Eva Costa
3
;
Diana Veiga
3
;
Manuel João Ferreira
3
;
4
;
Sandra Mattos
5
and
Miguel Tavares Coimbra
1
;
2
Affiliations:
1
Universidade do Porto, Portugal
;
2
Instituto de Telecomunicações, Portugal
;
3
Enermeter, Sistemas de Medição, Lda, Portugal
;
4
University of Minho, Portugal
;
5
Circulo do Coração de Pernambuco, Brazil
Keyword(s):
Ultrasound Images, Medical Image Processing, Active Contours, Segmentation and Tracking, Mitral Valve.
Abstract:
The mitral valve plays a vital role in our circulatory system. To study its functionality, it is important to
measure clinically relevant parameters, such as its thickness, mobility and shape. Since manual segmentation
is impractical, time consuming and requires expert knowledge, an automatic segmentation tool can have a
significant clinical impact, providing objective measures to clinicians for understanding the morphology and
behaviour of the mitral valve. In this work, a real time tracking method has been proposed for ultrasound
videos obtained with the Parasternal Long Axis view. The algorithm is semi-automatic, assumes manual
Anterior Mitral Leaflet segmentation in the first frame and then it uses mathematical morphology algorithms
to obtain tracking results, further refined by localized active contours during the whole cardiac cycle. Finally,
the medial axis is extracted for a quantitative analysis. Results show that the algorithm can segment 1137
frames extracted from 9 fully
annotated sequences of the real clinical video data in only 0.89 sec/frame, with
an average error of 5 pixels. Furthermore, the algorithms exhibited robust tracking performance in the most
difficult situations, which are large frame-to-frame displacements.
(More)