Automatic Detection of Left Ventricular Endocardial Boundary on B-mode Short Axis Echocardiography

B 모드 단축 심초음파 영상의 좌심실 내벽 윤곽선 자동 검출

In this paper, a method has been proposed for the fully automatic detection of left ventricular endocardial boundary in B-mode short axis echocardiography without manual intervention by human operator. The proposed method makes use of the weighted model that approximates to endocardium and incomplete edge information for echocardiography. Therefore, this method is more effective than boundary detection by only edge information. The implementation of this method is as follows. First, the proposed algorithms are used in order to detect the approximate boundary, then a weighted model with the approximate boundary is constructed. Finally, the cavity center of the left ventricle performing the Hough transform with the weighted model and edge image can be found automatically, and then the endocardial boundary using detected center, original image, weighted model, and edge image can be detected. validations of this method with experimental results on echo image of dog's heart and clinical echocardiography is verified.