Automatic coupled segmentation of endo- and epicardial borders in 3D echocardiography

In this paper, we present an extension of a computationally efficient Kalman filter based tracking framework to allow simultaneous tracking of several deformable models in volumetric data. The models are coupled through shared transform nodes in a hierarchical structure to enforce common position, orientation and scaling, but are allowed to alter shape independently. Automatic tracking of the endo- and epicardial border using two Doo-Sabin subdivision surfaces in 3D echocardiography serves as exemplary application. Fully automatic endo- and epicardial surface is demonstrated in a simulation and 5 in-vivo recordings of high image quality. The estimated myocardial volumes is overestimated by 4.2 ml (7.0%) compared to ground truth in the simulation, whereas the volumes in the in-vivo recordings are on average underestimated by 10.7 ml (8.0%) compared to independent reference segmentations.