3D left ventricular segmentation in echocardiography using a probabilistic data association deformable model

The segmentation of the left ventricle (LV) is an important tool to assess the cardiac function in ultrasound images of the heart. This paper presents a methodology for the segmentation of the LV in 3D echocardiography that is based on the probabilistic data association filter (PDAF). The proposed methodology comprises the following feature hierarchical approach: (i) edge detection in the vicinity of the surface (low level features); (ii) edge grouping to obtain potential LV surface patches (mid-level features); and (iii) patch filtering using a shape-PDAF framework (high level features). Also, we propose an automatic procedure to initialize the 3D deformable model. We show that the proposed methodology achieves remarkable accuracy between the obtained contour and expertise medical ground truth and compares favorably with the state-of-the-art segmentation methodologies.