Kang Ho Chul, Lee Jeongjin, Shin Juneseuk
School of Electronics & Information Engineering, Korea University Sejong Campus, Sejong, Korea.
School of Computer Science & Engineering, Soongsil University, Seoul, Korea.
Healthc Inform Res. 2016 Oct;22(4):285-292. doi: 10.4258/hir.2016.22.4.285. Epub 2016 Oct 31.
In this paper, we present an automatic method to segment four chambers by extracting a whole heart, separating the left and right sides of the heart, and spliting the atrium and ventricle regions from each heart in cardiac computed tomography angiography (CTA) efficiently.
We smooth the images by applying filters to remove noise. Next, the volume of interest is detected by using k-means clustering. In this step, the whole heart is coarsely extracted, and it is used for seed volumes in the next step. Then, we detect seed volumes using a geometric analysis based on anatomical information and separate the left and right heart regions with the power watershed algorithm. Finally, we refine the left and right sides of the heart using the level-set method, and extract the atrium and ventricle from the left and right heart regions using the split energy function.
We tested the proposed heart segmentation method using 20 clinical scan datasets which were acquired from various patients. To validate the proposed heart segmentation method, we evaluated its accuracy in segmenting four chambers based on four error evaluation metrics. The average values of differences between the manual and automatic segmentations were less than 3.3%, approximately.
The proposed method extracts the four chambers of the heart accurately, demonstrating that this approach can assist the cardiologist.
在本文中，我们提出一种自动方法，通过提取整个心脏、分离心脏的左右两侧，并在心脏计算机断层血管造影（CTA）中有效地从每个心脏中分割出心房和心室区域，来分割四腔心。
我们通过应用滤波器对图像进行平滑处理以去除噪声。接下来，使用k均值聚类检测感兴趣的体积。在这一步中，粗略提取整个心脏，并将其用于下一步的种子体积。然后，我们基于解剖学信息使用几何分析检测种子体积，并使用幂次分水岭算法分离左右心脏区域。最后，我们使用水平集方法细化心脏的左右两侧，并使用分割能量函数从左右心脏区域中提取心房和心室。
我们使用从不同患者获取的20个临床扫描数据集测试了所提出的心脏分割方法。为了验证所提出的心脏分割方法，我们基于四个误差评估指标评估了其在分割四腔心方面的准确性。手动分割和自动分割之间差异的平均值约小于3.3%。
所提出的方法能够准确提取心脏的四腔心，表明该方法可以辅助心脏病专家。
