Left atrial wall segmentation using clinically correlated metrics

The thickness of the left atrium wall may be an important parameter in atrial fibrillation disease mechanisms and subsequent treatment by catheter ablation. We have previously developed a simple, threshold-based, direct wall thickness measure from CT that has been found to correlate with clinical out- comes. In this paper, we describe the application of this method to the seg- mentation of the left atrium wall in the 2016 STACOM Left Atrium Wall Thickness Challenge. Our original method sought to partially automate the way a clinical researcher manually measures left atrial wall thickness to increase precision and repeatability. We have adapted our method to create a segmented volume instead of individual measurements in order to meet the challenge goals. We apply the method to the ten contrast-enhanced CT images provided