A level set approach for left ventricle detection in CT images using shape segmentation and optical flow

The left ventricle (LV) segmentation plays an important role in a subsequent process for the functional analysis of the LV. Typical segmentation of the endocardium wall in the ventricle excludes papillary muscles which leads to an incorrect measure of the ejected volume in the LV. In this paper we present a new variational strategy using a 2D level set framework that includes a local term for enhancing the low contrast structures and a 2D shape model. The shape model in the level set method is propagated to all image sequences corresponding to the cardiac cycles through the optical flow approach using the Hermite transform. To evaluate our strategy we use the Dice index and the Hausdorff distance to compare the segmentation results with the manual segmentation carried out by the physician.