Accurate automatic analysis of cardiac cine images

Acquisition of noncontrast agent cine cardiac magnetic resonance (CMR) gated images through the cardiac cycle is, at present, a well-established part of examining cardiac global function. However, regional quantification is less well established. We propose a new automated framework for analyzing the wall thickness and thickening function on these images that consists of three main steps. First, inner and outer wall borders are segmented from their surrounding tissues with a geometric deformable model guided by a special stochastic speed relationship. The latter accounts for Markov-Gibbs shape and appearance models of the object-of-interest and its background. In the second step, point-to-point correspondences between the inner and outer borders are found by solving the Laplace equation and provide initial estimates of the local wall thickness and the thickening function index. Finally, the effects of the segmentation error is reduced and a continuity analysis of the LV wall thickening is performed through iterative energy minimization using a generalized Gauss-Markov random field (GGMRF) image model. The framework was evaluated on 26 datasets from clinical cine CMR images that have been collected from patients with eleven independent studies, with chronic ischemic heart disease and heart damage. The performance evaluation of the proposed segmentation approach, based on the receiver operating characteristic (ROC) and Dice similarity coefficients (DSC) between manually drawn and automatically segmented contours, confirmed a high robustness and accuracy of the proposed segmentation approach. Furthermore, the Bland-Altman plot is used to assess the limit of agreement of our measurements of the global function parameters compared to the ground truth. Importantly, comparative results on the publicly available database (MICCAI 2009 Cardiac MR Left Ventricle Segmentation) demonstrated a superior performance of the proposed segmentation approach over published methods.