Segmentation of 4D cardiac images: investigation on statistical shape models

The purpose of this research was two-fold: (1) to investigate the properties of statistical shape models constructed from manually segmented cardiac ventricular chambers to confirm the validity of an automatic 4-dimensional (4D) segmentation model that uses gradient vector flow (GVF) images of the original data and (2) to develop software to further automate the steps necessary in active shape model (ASM) training. These goals were achieved by first constructing ASMs from manually segmented ventricular models by allowing the user to cite entire datasets for processing using a GVF-based landmarking procedure and principal component analysis (PCA) to construct the statistical shape model. The statistical shape model of one dataset was used to regulate the segmentation of another dataset according to its GVF, and these results were then analyzed and found to accurately represent the original cardiac data when compared to the manual segmentation results as the golden standard.