Endocardium and Epicardium Segmentation in MR Images Based on Developed Otsu and Dynamic Programming

In order to accurately extract the endocardium and epicardium of the left ventricle from cardiac magnetic resonance (MR) images, a method based on developed Otsu and dynamic programming has been proposed. First, regions with high gray value are divided into several left ventricle candidate regions by the developed Otsu algorithm, which based on constraining the search range of the ideal segmentation threshold. Then, left ventricular blood pool is selected from the candidate regions and its convex hull is found out as the endocardium. The epicardium is derived by applying dynamic programming method to find a closed path with minimum local cost. The local cost function of the dynamic programming method consists of two factors: boundary gradient and shape features. In order to improve the accuracy of segmentation, a non-maxima gradient suppression technique is adopted to get the boundary gradient. The experimental result of 138 MR images show that the method proposed has high accuracy and robustness. Copyright © 2014 IFSA Publishing, S. L.