Automatic Right Ventricular Ejection Fraction Computation from Equilibrium and First-Pass Scintigraphic Cardiac Images

Abstract Nakamura, E., Kehtarnavaz, N., Wendt, R. III, and Murphy, P., Automatic Right Ventricular Ejection Fraction Computation from Equilibrium and First-Pass Scintigraphic Cardiac Images, Digital Signal Processing 6 (1996), 233–239. This paper presents an automatic method for computing the right ventricular ejection fraction (RVEF) by using both equilibrium and first-pass scintigraphic cardiac images. The equilibrium images are used to extract the cardiac activity area. Together with the phase image derived from the right heart first-pass images, the cardiac area is then used to identify the subarea corresponding to the right ventricle. The RVEF is then computed from the regional counts in the end-diastolic and end-systolic frames. The average manually derived RVEFs agreed with the automatically determined RVEFs with an R value of 0.81. Using the average of the manually derived RVEFs as the “gold standard,” only one person processing manually had a lower mean squared error than the automatic program. These results suggest that automatic RVEF computation is potentially useful and hence clinical deployment is recommended.