Cardiac MRI Left Ventricle Segmentation and Quantification: A Framework Combining U-Net and Continuous Max-Flow

Abstract

Cardiac magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) is routinely used for cardiovascular disease diagnosis and therapy guidance. Left ventricle (LV) segmentation is typically required as a first step to quantify cardiac indices. In this work, we developed an automatic approach for LV segmentation and indices quantification of cardiac MRI. We employed a U-net convolutional neural network to generate LV segmentation probability maps. The initial probability maps were used to provide the labeling cost measurements of a continuous min-cut segmentation model and the final segmentation was regularized using image edge information. The continuous min-cut segmentation model was solved globally and exactly through convex relaxation and dual optimization on a GPU. We applied our approach to a clinical dataset of 45 subjects and achieved a mean DSC of \(89.4\pm 5.0\%\) and average symmetric surface distance of \(0.81\pm 0.31\) mm for LV myocardium segmentation. For LV indices quantification, we observed a mean absolute error of 114.8 mm\(^2\) for LV cavity, 168.6 mm\(^2\) for LV myocardium, \(\sim \)1.8 mm for LV cavity dimensions, and 1.2\({\sim }\)1.6 mm for LV myocardium wall thickness measurements. These results suggest that our framework provide the potential for LV function quantification using cardiac MRI.