Segmentation of 4D Cardiac MR Images Using a Probabilistic Atlas and the EM Algorithm

Abstract

In this paper an automatic atlas-based segmentation algorithm for 4D cardiac MR images is proposed. The algorithm is based on the 4D extension of the expectation maximisation (EM) algorithm. The EM algorithm uses a 4D probabilistic cardiac atlas to estimate the initial model parameters and to integrate a-priori information into the classification process. The probabilistic cardiac atlas has been constructed from the manual segmentations of 3D cardiac image sequences of 14 subjects. It provides space and time-varying probability maps for the left and right ventricle, the myocardium, and background structures such as the liver, stomach, lungs and skin. In addition to the probabilistic cardiac atlas, the segmentation algorithm incorporates spatial and temporal contextual information by using 4D Markov Random Fields (MRF). Validation against manual segmentations and computation of the correlation between manual and automatic segmentation on 249 3D volumes were calculated. Results show that the procedure can successfully segment the left ventricle (LV) (r=0.95), myocardium (r=0.83) and right ventricle (RV) (r=0.91).