Embedding Overlap Priors in Variational Left Ventricle Tracking

Tracking heart motion plays an essential role in the diagnosis of cardiovascular diseases. This study investigates overlap priors for variational tracking of the Left Ventricle (LV) in cardiac Magnetic Resonance (MR) sequences. The method consists of evolving two curves toward the LV endo- and epicardium boundaries. We derive the curve evolution equations by minimizing two functionals each containing an original overlap prior constraint. The latter measures the conformity of the overlap between the nonparametric (kernel-based) intensity distributions within the three target regions–LV cavity, myocardium and background–to a prior learned from a given segmentation of the first frame. The Bhattacharyya coefficient is used as an overlap measure. Different from existing intensity-driven constraints, the proposed priors do not assume implicitly that the overlap between the intensity distributions within different regions has to be minimal. This prevents both the papillary muscles from be...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2009
• Where: IEEE Transactions on Medical Imaging (TMI)
• Authors: Ismail Ben Ayed, Shuo Li and Ian Ross
• Keywords: Left Ventricle Tracking， Level Sets