Automatic 3-D segmentation of endocardial border of the left ventricle from ultrasound images

The segmentation of the left ventricle (LV) is an important task to assess the cardiac function in ultrasound images of the heart. This paper presents a novel methodology for the segmentation of the LV in three-dimensional (3-D) echocardiographic images based on the probabilistic data association filter (PDAF). The proposed methodology begins by initializing a 3-D deformable model either semiautomatically, with user input, or automatically, and it comprises the following feature hierarchical approach: 1) edge detection in the vicinity of the surface (low-level features); 2) edge grouping to obtain potential LV surface patches (mid-level features); and 3) patch filtering using a shape-PDAF framework (high-level features). This method provides good performance accuracy in 20 echocardiographic volumes, and compares favorably with the state-of-the-art segmentation methodologies proposed in the recent literature.