Active Contours with Optical Flow and Primitive Shape Priors for Echocardiographic Imagery

Abstract

Accurate delineation of object borders is highly desirable in echocardiography. Among other model-based techniques, active contours (or snakes) provide a unique and powerful approach to image analysis. In this work, we propose the use of a new external energy for a GVF snake, consisting of the optical flow data of moving heart structures (i.e. the perceived movement). This new external energy provides more information to the active contour model to combat noise in moving sequences. An automated primitive shape prior mechanism is also introduced, which further improves the results when dealing with especially noisy echocardiographic image cines. Results were compared with that of expert manual segmentations yielding promising sensitivities and system accuracies.