A novel level set method for segmentation of left and right ventricles from cardiac MR images

Abstract

In this paper, we propose a novel level set method for segmentation of cardiac left and right ventricles based on the distance regularized level set evolution (DRLSE) framework [7] and the distance regularized two-layer level set (DR2LS) model [17]. First, DRLSE is applied to obtain a preliminary segmentation of left and right ventricles, which is then used to initialize the endocardial contour, which is represented by the zero level contour of the level set function in our method. Then, the epi-cardial contour is represented by a different level contour of the same level set function. These two level sets are optimized by an energy minimization process to best fit the true endocardium and epicardium. In order to ensure smoothly varying distance between the two level contours, we introduce a distance regularization constraint in the energy function. With the region-scalable fitting (RSF) energy [8] as the data term, our method is able to deal with intensity inhomogeneities in the images, which is a main source of difficulty in image segmentation. Our method has been tested on cardiac MR images with promising results.