Clinical validation of fully-automated contour detection for gated radionuclide ventriculography with a slant-hole collimator.

A new fully-automated method for processing gated blood-pool images is presented and its clinical validity and performance for images with various noise levels are investigated using data obtained from a slant-hole collimator. The optimal preprocessing conditions are evaluated for the images with various noise levels to obtain the accurate ejection fraction, end-diastolic and end-systolic counts. This new method has successfully detected left ventricular contour in 92% of the 61 patients. The left ventricular ejection fraction obtained by the method related closely to that of contrast ventriculography (correlation coefficient r = 0.90). The end-diastolic volume also had a good correlation with contrast ventriculography (r = 0.90).