Automatic initialization for a snakes-based cardiac contour extraction

Segmentation of cardiac structures has a great impact in the quantification of parameters indicative of heart function. The preferred technique for this segmentation is based on edge detection, where deformable models have extensively been used to obtain cardiac cavities contours. This work proposes two alternatives to the traditionally used active model. The first consists of a pre-segmentation algorithm to automatically obtain an initial contour, while the second is a snakes formulation taking into account the explicit analytical expression of the natural cubic splines. The algorithms were tested by comparing their performance in two types of MRI cardiac sequences and the obtained results were compared with the manual tracing of contours as defined by an expert