Towards Automatic Extraction of the Myocardium in Temporal MRI Using Object-based Segmentation

Abstract

Visualizing the deformation of the myocardium over an entire heart cycle is essential for the assessment of local defects in the heart muscle. For this purpose, an automatic segmentation of the myocardium is a key requirement, which would then also form the basis for inspecting cardiac morphology, function and perfusion. In this paper we present an automatic object-based approach for segmenting the left ventricle (LV). The algorithm uses prior knowledge about the topology and geometry of the segmented structure, which is integrated in a region-based graph representation of the image. Our method was tested on cine MR sequences with promising results, and it also performed well when applied to perfusion data.