A software tool for segmentation of the myocardium in CMR exams using level-set algorithm

Background In many Cardiac MR Exams, we need to extract the myocardium area precisely, which is a labor-intensive task if performed manually. Furthermore, the manual segmentation is a source of error since it highly depends on the user experience. Several methods, therefore, have been introduced to facilitate and expedite this time-consuming procedure [1-3].We have implemented a software tool in processing of cardiac tagging images and calculation of strain, which is sensitive to segmentation especially in radial direction. Compared to other methods, such as active contours and snakes, “level-set” is usually less sensitive to the initialization and also can be splitted automatically and quickly to detect more than one connected component [4]. Hence, we used level-set as the core of our user-friendly software to make it robust to initialization and segmentation of MR images. The possibility of intensity inhomogeneity was also considered.