Cardiac functional indices, such as ejection fraction and regional wall motion/ thickening, are commonly used for assessing the contractility and functionality of the heart in clinical practice. An important step for computer-aided determination of functional indices is the automated segmentation of the heart from computed tomography angiography (CTA) and the partitioning of the left ventricle into 16 segments. We develop a fully automatic scheme which not only segments the whole heart from cardiac CTA images, but also partitions the left ventricle, including the blood pool and myocardium, into 16 segments of bull’s eye plot. The segmentation is based on image registration and atlas propagation techniques, whereas the bull’s eye plot is first obtained through atlas propagation and then further improved to correct inconsistency across different subjects, uneven size for each segment and “zig-zag” edges between them. In this preliminary study, a cohort of ten clinical CTA data was employed to compute and evaluate the regional functional indices as well as the global indices.

Date Published: 28 February 2013
PDF: 6 pages
Proc. SPIE 8670, Medical Imaging 2013: Computer-Aided Diagnosis, 867017 (28 February 2013); doi: 10.1117/12.2007777

Published in SPIE Proceedings Vol. 8670:
Medical Imaging 2013: Computer-Aided Diagnosis
Carol L. Novak; Stephen Aylward, Editor(s)