Automated endocardial contour detection in short-axis 2-D echocardiograms; methodology and assessment of variability

To obtain objective and reproducible data on left-ventricular (LV) wall motion from esophageal short-axis echocardiograms, an automated endocardial contour-detection technique has been developed. The method is based on minimum-cost contour detection using a novel iterative approach, which allows complex nonconvex contours to be found with a simple model. Required operator interaction is limited to the manual definition of the center of the LV cavity. To determine the inter- and intraoperator variabilities of this automated approach, an intermediate evaluation has been carried out on the end-systolic and end-diastolic images of 10 patient studies. The method was found to be minimally sensitive to small variations in the manually indicated LV center points. However, the algorithm requires further improvements for specific problematic image regions, such as at the sites of the papillary muscles