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Automated contour detection of the left ventricle in short axis view in 2D echocardiograms

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Abstract

This paper describes a semi-automatic system for the extraction of the endocardial border on a sequence of two-dimensional short axis echocardiograms. The delineation in the images is based on a dynamic programming technique which takes into consideration the radial and tangent gradient, the intensity, the smoothness of the extracted contour and a rough estimation of the location of the contour, derived from the previous frame of the time sequence. For the first frame, the user is asked to specify a region of interest. Within this region of interest, the developed system defines a circle as a rough estimation of the location of the endocardium. The developed system allows iteration of the delineation process to obtain a more detailed outline of the endocardium. The outlined contours on successive echo-frames are verified as the system compares their areas. This verification is important since the delineation process is purely sequential and errors occurring in an intermediate frame of the time sequence may influence the results in the subsequent frames.

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Maes, L., Bijnens, B., Suetens, P. et al. Automated contour detection of the left ventricle in short axis view in 2D echocardiograms. Machine Vis. Apps. 6, 1–9 (1993). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF01212427

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