Mutual cineMR/RT3DUS cardiac segmentation.

We present a new method to segment a cardiac RT3D ultrasound volume by integrating the registered segmentation of a cardiac cine-MR series in short axis of the same patient. The motivation behind our method is to improve the ultrasound segmentation process by integrating a reference shape built using the cine-MR segmentation on the same patient. As a side effect we obtain a close registration of the cine MR short axis slices with respect to the ultrasound volume. We use the level set framework with a functional including a region-based and a shape-based term. The reference shape is iteratively registered onto the contour during the ultrasound segmentation process and using an affine transform. The proposed method is demonstrated on the MICCAI11 Motion Tracking Challenge database.