title: Similarity enhancement for automatic segmentation of cardiac structures in computed tomography volumes.
abstract: The aim of this research is proposing a 3-D similarity enhancement technique useful for improving the segmentation of cardiac structures in Multi-Slice Computerized Tomography (MSCT) volumes. The similarity enhancement is obtained by subtracting the intensity of the current voxel and the gray levels of their adjacent voxels in two volumes resulting after preprocessing. Such volumes are: a. - a volume obtained after applying a Gaussian distribution and a morphological top-hat filter to the input and b. - a smoothed volume generated by processing the input with an average filter. Then, the similarity volume is used as input to a region growing algorithm. This algorithm is applied to extract the shape of cardiac structures, such as left and right ventricles, in MSCT volumes. Qualitative and quantitative results show the good performance of the proposed approach for discrimination of cardiac cavities.
authors.affiliation: Grupo de Ingeniería Biomédica, Facultad de Ingeniería, Universidad de Los Andes, Mérida 5101, Venezuela. vermig@ula.ve
authors.forename: Miguel
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Vera
authors.forename: Antonio
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Bravo
authors.forename: Mireille
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Garreau
authors.forename: Rubén
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Medina
mesh_terms: D000465:Algorithms; D001331:Automation; D054893:Cone-Beam Computed Tomography / Q000379:methods*; D006321:Heart / Q000000981:diagnostic imaging*; D006352:Heart Ventricles / Q000000981:diagnostic imaging; D006801:Humans; D011856:Radiographic Image Enhancement / Q000379:methods*