[Insight-users] Need advice on LV MRI segmentation

[Barry Branham]

Hi all,

I'm working on a project to segment left ventricular walls from 2D MRI 
images and would like to get advice on how to proceed with the 
epicardial walls.

My project is to segment left ventricular walls (the round ones) from 2D 
MRI images.  I'm using 2D because the main application uses Tagged MRI 
images for determining tissue displacements for input into an FEA 
application for determining wall stress/strains.  And the Imaging 
sequence requires long patient breath holds so apparently they are 
limited in the number of slices output so my slice spacing is about 
8mm.  Fortunately they have recently also acquired non-tagged images 
that I can use for segmentation.  I have had good luck segmenting the 
endocardial walls using IntensityWindow -> CurvatureFlow -> 
ConfidenceConnected, then
DeformableMesh2DFilter which I converted from DeformableMesh3DFilter.

The epicardial walls are harder because of the lack of large gradients 
on part of the outside (non-septal) wall.  My current plan is to use a 
deformable model generated by getting the major axis from the endo wall 
and generating a slightly larger oriented ellipse from that.  I need a 
good way to enlarge it to fit the epicardial wall.

Thanks for any suggestions,
Barry Branham
Cardiothoracic Surgery Research
Washington University School of Medicine
St. Louis, MO