LEFT VENTRICULAR SEGMENTATION USING DOUBLE REGION-BASED SNAKES

We present a double region-based snake method to segment endocardial and epicardial boundaries of the left ventricle in cardiac MR images. The method is based on a region-based parametric active contour. The first active contour is designed to segment the endocardial boundary while the second active contour is to segment the epicardial boundary. We insert the inter-contour forces between the two convolving contours in order to control the distance between them. Our proposed method not only has an ability to segment the endocardial and the epicardial boundaries of the left ventricle simultaneously without requiring any training sets, it is also able to segment cardiac MR images with low contrast between the myocardium and other organs. We initially place both contours within the epicardial boundary of the left ventricle. Furthermore, the problem that one of the contours may, on occasions, be attracted to the boundary of the papillary muscles is solved by checking for the convex hull condition. Our results show successful simultaneous segmentations of the endocardial and the epicardial boundaries, thus the left ventricle of the heart in each MR image