Incorporating temporal information into active contour method for detecting heart wall boundary from echocardiographic image sequence.
A new method which incorporates temporal information into the active contour function is proposed to solve the dropout and speckle noise problems encountered when detecting the inner heart wall boundary from echocardiographic image sequence. The ventricular boundary is considered to be composed of strong and weak segments. The weak segments are interfered by image degradations in ultrasound, and they are too weak to constrain the curve evolution. Temporal information is incorporated into the external energy of the active contour function to recover the missing boundary and strengthen the weak segments. Experimental results demonstrate the advantages of the proposed method for the intended task.
Fang
Wen
W
School of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, Singapore. fa0001en@ntu.edu.sg
Chan
Kap Luk
KL
Fu
Sheng
S
Krishnan
Shankar M
SM
D000465:Algorithms; D016000:Cluster Analysis; D004452:Echocardiography / Q000379:methods*; D006352:Heart Ventricles / Q000000981:diagnostic imaging*; D006801:Humans; D007089:Image Enhancement / Q000379:methods; D007090:Image Interpretation, Computer-Assisted / Q000379:methods*; D010363:Pattern Recognition, Automated / Q000379:methods*; D015203:Reproducibility of Results; D012680:Sensitivity and Specificity; D013382:Subtraction Technique