Multiphase segmentation using an implicit dual shape prior: Application to detection of left ventricle in cardiac MRI

Cardiac magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) has been extensively used in the diagnosis of cardiovascular disease and its quantitative evaluation. Cardiac MRI techniques have been progressively improved, providing high-resolution anatomical and functional information. One of the key steps in the assessment of cardiovascular disease is the quantitative analysis of the left ventricle (LV) contractile function. Thus, the accurate delineation of LV boundary is of great interest to improve diagnostic performance. In this work, we present a novel segmentation algorithm of LV from cardiac MRI incorporating an implicit shape prior without any training phase using level sets in a variational framework. The segmentation of LV still remains a challenging problem due to its subtle boundary, occlusion, and inhomogeneity. In order to overcome such difficulties, a shape prior knowledge on the anatomical constraint of LV is integrated into a region-based segmentation framework. The shape prior is introduced based on the anatomical shape similarity between endocardium and epicardium. The shape of endocardium is assumed to be mutually similar under scaling to the shape of epicardium. An implicit shape representation using signed distance function is introduced and their discrepancy is measured in a probabilistic way. Our shape constraint is imposed by a mutual similarity of shapes without any training phase that requires a collection of shapes to learn their statistical properties. The performance of the proposed method has been demonstrated on fifteen clinical datasets, showing its potential as the basis in the clinical diagnosis of cardiovascular disease.