Automatic left atrium segmentation by cutting the blood pool at narrowings.

This paper presents a method to extract heart structures from CTA and MRA data sets, in particular the left atrium. First, the segmented blood pool is subdivided at narrowings in small components. Second, these basic components are merged automatically so that they represent the different heart structures. The resulting cutting surfaces have a relatively small diameter compared to the diameter of the neighboring heart chambers. Both steps are controlled by only one fixed parameter. The method is fast and allows interactive post-processing by the user. Experiments on various data sets show the accuracy, robustness and repeatability of this approach.