Left Ventricular Myocardial Segmentation in 3D Ultrasound Recordings: Effect of Different Endoand Epicardial Coupling Strategies

Cardiac volume/function assessment remains a critical step in daily cardiology and 3D ultrasound plays an increasingly important role. Though development of automatic endocardial segmentation methods has received much attention, the same cannot be said about epicardial segmentation, in spite of the importance of full myocardial segmentation. In this study, different ways of coupling the endo- and epicardial segmentation are contrasted and compared to uncoupled segmentation. For this purpose, the B-spline Explicit Active Surfaces framework was used. Twenty-seven 3D echocardiographic images were used to validate the different coupling strategies which were compared to manual contouring of the endo- and epicardial borders performed by an expert. It is shown that an independent segmentation of the endocardium followed by an epicardial segmentation coupled to the endocardium is the most advantageous. In this way, a framework for fully automatic 3D myocardial segmentation is proposed using a novel coupling strategy.status: publishe