Abstract
This paper intends to explore the effect of the enhanced snake variable model in the segmentation of cardiac ultrasound images and its adoption in quantitative measurement of cardiac cavity. First, the basic principles of the traditional snake model and the gradient vector flow (GVF) snake model are explained. Then, an ellipsoid model is constructed to obtain the initial contour of the heart based on the three-dimensional volume of cardiac ultrasound image, and a discretized triangular mesh model is generated. Finally, the vortical gradient vector flow (VGVF) external force field is introduced and combined with the greedy algorithm to process the deformation of the initial ellipsoid contour of the heart. The segmentation effect is quantitatively evaluated regarding the area overlap rate (AOR) and the mean contour distance (MCD). The results show that the VGVF snake model can segment the deep recessed area of the “U-shaped map” in contrast to the traditional snake model and the GVF snake model. After being applied to ultrasonic image segmentation, the VGVF snake model obtains the segmentation result that is close to the doctor's manual segmentation result, and the average AOR and MCD are 97.4% and 3.2, respectively. The quantitative evaluation of the cardiac cavity is carried out based on the segmentation results, and the measurement of the volume change of the left ventricle within a cardiac cycle is realized. To sum up, VGVF snake model is superior to the traditional snake and GVF snake models in terms of ultrasonic image segmentation, which realizes the three-dimensional segmentation and quantitative calculation of the cardiac cavity.
Highlights
In the field of modern medicine, imaging information has become an indispensable tool for diagnosis, treatment, and research
Snake model searches for the boundary or region of interest (ROI) in the image, which is the process of finding the energy minimum curve. ere are many ways of image energy in the traditional snake model, and the problem of minimizing image energy can be transformed into a problem of solving functional extremum [14]
Since the external force field of gradient vector flow (GVF) is obtained through the principle of thermal diffusion, which is equivalent to multiscale Gaussian convolution, the Euler equation is calculated to solve the functional extremum in equation (7)
Summary
In the field of modern medicine, imaging information has become an indispensable tool for diagnosis, treatment, and research. In cardiovascular ultrasound diagnosis and treatment, the morphological characteristics of the heart are important information for detection, such as the heart wall thickness, transverse diameter, motion range, and anatomical structure. Three-dimensional reconstruction, and functional mapping registration in computeraided diagnosis technology are all important components of current cardiovascular ultrasound medical diagnosis [5]. Snake model has been widely used in auxiliary extraction of image features, target segmentation, tracking of moving targets, etc., and provides reliable segmentation results for target edge detection, video matching, and image 3D reconstruction. Yan et al [8] used the snake model to segment the ultrasound image surgical instruments during surgery [8] This model has problems such as initialization and poor segmentation of recessed areas [9,10,11]. A quantitative calculation of the volume change of the left ventricular cavity is performed based on the results of the segmentation of the cardiac cavity. is study intends to provide a reference for improving the segmentation effect of cardiac ultrasound images
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