Automatic segmentation of echocardiography based on a morphological reconstruction algorithm.

OBJECTIVE

To improve the precision of the traditional segmentation of echocardiogram, by suppressing the influence from inherent speckle noises in medical ultrasonic images.

METHOD

An automatic segmentation method based on reconstructed morphology was proposed in this paper. First, the opening and closing operations by reconstruction were imposed to the ultrasonic image. Second, the top-hat operation was used to extract the bright and/or dark features and to find out the boundaries corresponding to these features, whereby implemented the automatic segmentation.

RESULT

The segmented echocardiogram had less artificial boundaries resulted from speckle noise, and could accurately be extracted the artery and ventricle.

CONCLUSION

The presented method can detect both dark and bright objects accurately, and the boundary has a fine continuity. In addition, the algorithm is also applicable to the extraction of sole bright/dark features, accordingly to reduce the complexity and time needed and to improve the accuracy.