Multiview myocardial tracking in echocardiographic 2D sequences using shape and motion constrained level-set

Abstract

Segmentation of the myocardium in echocardiographic images is an important task for the diagnosis of heart disease. This task is difficult due to the inherent problems of echographic images (i.e. low contrast, speckle noise, signal dropout, presence of shadows). In this article, we extend a level-set method recently proposed in [1] in order to track the whole myocardium in echocardiographic sequences. To this end, we formulate a new motion prior energy that constrains the zero-level of the implicit function to satisfy the optical flow hypothesis. The algorithm is then compared to experts references and to another method on a dataset of 12 sequences (more than 700 images) acquired in the four main echocardiographic views.