Segmentation of the Ventricle Membranes in Short-Axis Sequences by Optical Flow Base on DLSRE Model

Recent studies have pointed out that the boundary of the extracted ventricle membranes is unsmooth, and the segmentation of the cardiac papillary muscle and trabecular muscle do inconformity the clinical requirements. To address these issues, this paper proposes an automatic segment algorithm for continuously extracting ventricle membranes boundary, which adopts optical flow field information and sequential images information. The images are cropped by frame difference method, which according to the continuity of adjacent slices of cardiac MRI images. The roughly boundary of epicardium is extracted by the Double level set region evolution (DLSRE) model, which combines image global information, local information and edge information. The ventricle endocardium and epicardial contours are tracked according to the optical flow field information between image sequences. The segmentation results are optimized by Delaunay triangulation algorithm. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method can improve the accuracy of segmenting the ventricle endocardium and epicardium contours, and segment the contour of the smooth ventricle membrane edge that meets the clinical definition.