Mitral annulus segmentation from three-dimensional ultrasound

An accurate and reproducible segmentation of the mitral valve annulus from 3D ultrasound is useful to clinicians and researchers in applications such as pathology diagnosis and mitral valve modeling. Current segmentation methods, however, are based on 2D information, resulting in inaccuracies and a lack of spatial coherence. We present a segmentation algorithm which, given a single user-specified point near the center of the valve, uses max-flow and active contour methods to delineate the annulus geometry in 3D. Preliminary comparisons to manual segmentations and a sensitivity study show the algorithm is both accurate and robust.