Method for the Left Ventricle Segmentation Applicable to Distinct Echocardiography Image Databases

摘要

The process of obtaining cardiological parameters in echocardiography images demands profound experience of the professional who analyses the images. The segmentation of the heart facilitates the obtaining of parameters in those images and benefits the diagnosis process. The present work objective was to develop a method for the segmentation of the left ventricle (LV) in echocardiography images of parasternal long-axis view from distinct databases that exhibits diversified quality. The database as a whole used in this paper consists of 67 two-dimensional gray-level echocardiograms recordings. Kohonen's Self-Organizing Map and the Polynomial Interpolation were used to find the endocardial and epicardial walls of LV in those images. The Dice coefficient was used to compare the segmented region to the region defined by the contours drawn by a cardiologist. The mean Dice coefficient was 0.93 ± 0.02. The result validation by the Dice coefficient suggests that the system developed for the segmentation of the LV may be usable in distinct echocardiography image databases.