Automatic left ventricular contour extraction from cardiac magnetic resonance images using cantilever beam and random walk approach.

Heart failure is a well-known debilitating disease. From clinical point of view, segmentation of left ventricle (LV) is important in a cardiac magnetic resonance (CMR) image. Accurate parameters are desired for better diagnosis. Proper and fast image segmentation of LV is of paramount importance prior to estimation of these parameters. We prefer random walk approach over other existing techniques due to two of its advantages: (1) robustness to noise and, (2) it does not require any special condition to work. Performance of the method solely depends on the selection of initial seed and parameter β. Problems arise while applying this method to different kind of CMR images bearing different ischemia. It is due due to their implicit geometry definitions unlike general images, where the boundary of LV in the image is not available in an explicit form. This type of images bear multi-labeled LV and the manual seed selection in these images introduces variability in the results. In view of this, the paper presents two modifications in the algorithm: (1) automatic seed selection and, (2) automatic estimation of β from the image. The highlight of our method is its ability to succeed with minimum number of initial seeds.