Automatic initial estimation of the left ventricular myocardial midwall in emission tomograms using Kohonen maps

A new method to make an automatic initial estimation of the position of the middle of the left ventricular (LV) myocardial wall (LV myocardial midwall) in emission tomograms is presented. This method eliminates the manual interaction still required by other, more accurate LV delineation algorithms, and which consists of indicating the LV long axis and/or the LV extremities. A well-known algorithm from the world of neural networks, Kohonen´s self-organizing maps, was adapted to use general shapes and to behave well for data with large background noise