title: Left Ventricular Myocardial Segmentation in 3-D Ultrasound Recordings: Effect of Different Endocardial and Epicardial Coupling Strategies.
abstract: Cardiac volume/function assessment remains a critical step in daily cardiology, and 3-D ultrasound plays an increasingly important role. Though development of automatic endocardial segmentation methods has received much attention, the same cannot be said about epicardial segmentation, in spite of the importance of full myocardial segmentation. In this paper, different ways of coupling the endocardial and epicardial segmentations are contrasted and compared with uncoupled segmentation. For this purpose, the B-spline explicit active surfaces framework was used; 27 3-D echocardiographic images were used to validate the different coupling strategies, which were compared with manual contouring of the endocardial and epicardial borders performed by an expert. It is shown that an independent segmentation of the endocardium followed by an epicardial segmentation coupled to the endocardium is the most advantageous. In this way, a framework for fully automatic 3-D myocardial segmentation is proposed using a novel coupling strategy.
authors.forename: Joao
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Pedrosa
authors.forename: Daniel
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: Barbosa
authors.forename: Brecht
authors.initials: B
authors.lastname: Heyde
authors.forename: Frederic
authors.initials: F
authors.lastname: Schnell
authors.forename: Assami
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Rosner
authors.forename: Piet
authors.initials: P
authors.lastname: Claus
authors.forename: Jan
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: D'hooge
mesh_terms: D000465:Algorithms; D019560:Echocardiography, Three-Dimensional / Q000379:methods*; D006352:Heart Ventricles / Q000000981:diagnostic imaging*; D006801:Humans; D010496:Pericardium / Q000000981:diagnostic imaging*; D015203:Reproducibility of Results