Robust level set for heart cavities detection in ultrasound images

Abstract

The class of geometric deformable models, also known as level sets, has brought tremendous impact on medical imagery due to its capability of topology preservation and fast shape recovery. Ultrasonic heart images are often characterized by high level of speckle noise causing erroneous detection of cavities. We propose a new stopping term for computing level sets in order to robustly detect the heart cavities in echocardiographic images. Robustness is ensured by the use of the coefficient of variation. Experimental results show significant improvement, especially for images acquired with low frequencies