A study of left ventricular (LV) segmentation on cardiac cine-MR images

Abstract

Left ventricular segmentation from cardiac images has high impact to have early diagnosis of various cardiovascular disorders. However, it is really a challenging task to segment left ventricular images from magnetic resonance image (MRI). In this paper, we explore several state-of-the-art segmentation algorithms applied on left ventricular (LV) segmentation on cardiac cine-MR images. Both adaptive and global thresholding algorithms along with region-based segmentation algorithm have been explored. Edge-based segmentation is disregard due to the absence of edge information in the employed dataset. For evaluation, we explored a benchmark dataset that was used for the MICCAI 3D segmentation challenge. We found that the cardiac MRI global thresholding has proved to be much efficient and robust than the adaptive thresholding. We achieved more than 92% accuracy for global thresholding, whereas, about 78% accuracy for the adaptive thresholding approach. The use of entropy or histogram to characterize segmentation in place of the intensity value of the pixel has a vital effect on segmentation efficiency. It is evident that the intensity information is corrupted by acquisition procedure, as well as the structure of organs. Due to the lack of boundary information in cardiac cine-MRI, clustering and region-based segmentation have produced more than 93% segmentation accuracy. For the case of soft clustering, the increased accuracy is found as 96%. However, more explorations are required, specially based on deep learning approaches on very large datasets.