Comprehensive segmentation of cine cardiac MR images.

A typical Cardiac Magnetic Resonance (CMR) examination includes acquisition of a sequence of short-axis (SA) and long-axis (LA) images covering the cardiac cycle. Quantitative analysis of the heart function requires segmentation of the left ventricle (LV) SA images, while segmented LA views allow more accurate estimation of the basal slice and can be used for slice registration. Since manual segmentation of CMR images is very tedious and time-consuming, its automation is highly required. In this paper, we propose a fully automatic 2D method for segmenting LV consecutively in LA and SA images. The approach was validated on 35 patients giving mean segmentation error smaller than one pixel, both for LA and SA, and accurate LV volume measurements.