Echocardiography Image Segmentation: A Survey

Segmentation is an important step in medical imaging to acquire qualitative measurements such as the location of the desired objects and also for quantitative measurements such as area, volume or the analysis of dynamic behaviour of anatomical structures over time. Among these images, ultrasound images play a crucial role, because they can be produced on video-rate and therefore allows a dynamic analysis of moving structures. In addition, the acquisition of these images is non-invasive, cheap, and does not require ionizing radiations compared to other medical imaging techniques. On the other hand, the automatic segmentation of anatomical structures in ultrasound imagery is a real challenge due to acoustic interferences (speckle noise) and artifacts which are inherent in these images. This paper surveys the literature often recent researches on echocardiography image segmentation methods, focusing on techniques developed for medical. First, we present a review of articles by clinical application to highlight the approaches that have been investigated and degree of validation that has been done in different clinical domains. Then, we present a classification of methodology in terms of use of prior information. We conclude by selecting ten recent papers which have presented original ideas that have demonstrated particular clinical usefulness or potential specific to the echocardiography segmentation problem. The contribution of the paper is in three ways: 1) to serve as a tutorial on the field for both clinicians and technologists, 2) to provide an extensive account of segmentation techniques in a comprehensive and systematic manner, and 3) to critically review recent approaches in terms of their performance and degree of clinical evaluation with respect to the final goal of cardiac functional analysis.