ModelDrivenbyFuzzyInference.PDFVIP

Cardiac LV Segmentation Using a 3D Active Shape Model Driven by Fuzzy Inference H.C. van Assen, M.G. Danilouchkine, F. Behloul, H.J. Lamb, R.J. van der Geest, J.H.C. Reiber, and B.P.F. Lelieveldt Division of Image Processing, Department of Radiology, Leiden University Medical Center, PO BOX 9600, 2300 RC Leiden, Netherlands, h.c.van_assen@lumc.nl Abstract. Manual quantitative analysis of cardiac left ventricular function using multi-slice CT is labor intensive because of the large datasets. In previous work, an intrinsically three-dimensional segmentation method for cardiac CT images was presented based on a 3D Active Shape Model (3D-ASM). This model systematically overestimated left ventricular volume and underestimated blood pool volume, due to inaccurate estimation of candidate points during the model update steps. In this paper, we propose a novel ASM candidate point generation method based on a Fuzzy Inference System (FIS), which uses image patches as an input. Visual and quantitative evaluation of the results for 7 out of 9 patients shows substantial improvement for endocardial contours, while the resulting volume errors decrease considerably (blood pool: –39±29 cubic voxels in the previous model, ?0.66±6.2 cubic voxels in the current). Standard deviation of the epicardial volume decreases by approximately 50%. 1 Introduction Deformable statistical models have proven to be highly useful in medical image analysis. Especially with respect to segmentation tasks, they can be very effective and therefore they form an active field of research. The knowledge in the model ranges from shape and shape variation to gray level information. Since 1992, Cootes et al. introduced several statistical modeling methods, the Point Distribution Model (PDM) [1], the Active Shape Model (ASM) [2], which i