Semi-automated Processing of Real-Time CMR Scans for Left Ventricle Segmentation

Abstract

We present a workflow for processing real-time cardiac MR (RT-CMR) scans for segmenting the left ventricle (LV) on short-axis slices (SAX). Our method is based on image registration, where the LV endocardium and epicardium are segmented by propagating a reference contour over all the frames of the RT-CMR SAX scans. Our method was evaluated on 19 subjects, the accuracy of the automatic LV endocardium and epicardium segmentation was compared to those defined manually. The proposed method obtained a dice similarity coefficient (DSC) of 0.94 and a mean surface-to-surface distance (MSD) measure of 0.89 ± 0.53 mm. Additionally, a number of automatically obtained clinical measures were compared to ground truth values. On average we obtained a Pearson’s correlation coefficient (R) of 0.94 (0.99–0.74).