Segmentation of Cardiac Images by the Force Field Driven Speed Term

The class of geometric deformable models, so-called level sets, has brought tremendous impact to medical imagery. In this paper we present yet another application of level sets to medical imaging. The method we give here will in a way modify the speed term in the standard level sets equation of motion. To do so we build a potential based on the distance and the gradient of the image we study. In turn the potential gives rise to the force field: ~ FF (x, y) = ∑ ∀(p,q)∈I ((x, y) − (p, q)) |∇I(p,q)| |(x,y)−(p,q)| . The direction and intensity of the force field at each point will determine the direction of the contour’s evolution. The images we used to test our method were produced by the Univesité de Sherbrooke’s PET scanners. Keywords—PET, Cardiac, Heart, Mouse, Geodesic, Geometric, Level Sets, Deformable Models, Edge Detection, Segmentation.