Towards automatic full heart segmentation in computed-tomography images

Abstract

We present a robust, fast and fully automatic approach enabling the segmentation of the main anatomical structures of the heart in CT images. The proposed method is based on the adaptation of a 3D triangulated mesh to new unknown images exploiting simultaneously knowledge of organ shape and typical gray level appearance in images, both learned from a training database made of 28 data sets. The described approach was tested on more than 50 volume images at different cardiac phases. Visual inspection by experts reveals that the proposed method is overall robust and succeeds in segmenting the heart up to minor interactive local corrections