Image-based clustering and connected component labeling for rapid automated left and right ventricular endocardial volume extraction and segmentation in full cardiac cycle multi-frame MRI images of cardiac patients

Abstract

A rapid method for left and right ventricular endocardial volume segmentation and clinical cardiac parameter calculation from MRI images of cardiac patients is presented. The clinical motivation is providing cardiologists a tool for assessing the cardiac function in a patient through the left ventricular endocardial volume's ejection fraction. A new method combining adapted fuzzy membership-based c-means pixel clustering and connected regions component labeling is used for automatic segmentation of the left and right ventricular endocardial volumes. This proposed pixel clustering with labeling approach avoids manual initialization or user intervention and does not require specifying the region of interest. This method fully automatically extracts the left and right ventricular endocardial volumes and avoids manual tracing on all MRI image frames in the complete cardiac cycle from systole to diastole. The average computational processing time per frame is 0.6s, making it much more efficient than deformable methods, which need several iterations for the evolution of the snake or contour. Accuracy of the automated method presented herein was validated against manual tracing-based extraction, performed with the guidance of cardiac experts, on several MRI frames. Dice coefficients between the proposed automatic versus manual traced ventricular endocardial volume segmentations were observed to be 0.9781 ± 0.0070 (for left ventricular endocardial volume) and 0.9819 ± 0.0058 (for right ventricular endocardial volume), and the Pearson correlation coefficients were observed to be 0.9655 ± 0.0206 (for left ventricular endocardial volume) and 0.9870 ± 0.0131 (for right ventricular endocardial volume). Graphical abstract The left ventricular endocardial volume segmentation methodology illustrated as a series of algorithms.