Myocardial segmentation in late-enhancement MR images via registration and propagation of cine contours

Segmentation of myocardium in Late Gadolinium Enhanced (LGE) MR images is often difficult due to accumulation of contrast agent in the infarct areas, leading to poor delineation from adjacent blood pools. Thus, manual determination of the endo-and epicardial contours is challenging, time consuming, and subject to significant intra-and inter-observer variability. In this paper, we propose to use prior information from cine images of the same patient to achieve accurate segmentation in the corresponding LGE images. The proposed method first delineates the endo-and epicardial borders in the higher quality cine images of the patient´s heart. Then, a robust multiscale registration framework incorporating multiscale total variation (TV) flow as a preprocessing procedure is used to align the 3D cine and 2D LGE data for the same patient. The contours from the cine images are then propagated to the LGE dataset using the same transformation. Promising results were achieved through experimental validation.