Segmentation of pathologic hearts in long-axis late-enhancement MRI

We propose a new method to segment long-axis cardiac MR images acquired with a late-enhancement protocol. Detecting the myocardium boundaries is difficult in these images because healthy myocardium appears dark while the intensity of enhanced areas ranges from gray to white, depending on the myocardial damage. In this context, geometrical template deformation, alternated with the update of a damaged tissue map, allows us to include abnormal myocardium parts in the final segmentation. The template and map are initialized using short-axis images and the deformation parameters are adapted according to the type of enhancement pattern. Good segmentation results are obtained on a database of real pathologic heart images presenting various types of abnormal myocardium tissues.