Automatic segmentation of pathological tissues in cardiac MRI

Abstract

In the context of cardiac viability assessment, we propose a new fully automatic method to segment and quantify myocardial pathological tissues in Late Enhancement Cardiac Magnetic Resonance images. Our two main contributions are a generic image intensity analysis and an original variational segmentation method, the Fast Region Competition. The obtained results are robust to anatomical variability and partial volume effects and false positives are avoided. To validate our results, we use representations that are independent of myocardium shape and size and compute clinically relevant indicators. The proposed method was tested on 100 slices and compared to other classical segmentation approaches, showing the best agreement with semi-automatic expert delineations.