Automatic segmentation of the left ventricle into 17 anatomical regions in cardiac MR imaging

Analysis and characterization of anatomical segments in the left ventricle (LV) of the heart in cardiac MRI convey clinical significance. Based on the standard defined by the American Heart Association (AHA), the LV is divided into 17 anatomical segments. In this paper, we propose a novel method to automatically partition the LV into 17 segments, which allows automated analysis of these segments. Our method starts with assigning each slice with a section tag by using the papillary muscles and the LV cavity as references: basal, mid-cavity, apical and apex. It then partitions each slice into 4 or 6 segments by extracting the relevant points on the outer circle of a fitted cylinder and identifying the image orientation by using the lung as a reference. We evaluate our method on 45 patients with different cardiac conditions. The partition of mid-cavity has the best agreement with the ground truth, followed by basal and then apical sections for all groups of patients.