A multiple active contour model for cardiac boundary detection on echocardiographic sequences.

Tracing of left-ventricular epicardial and endocardial borders on echocardiographic sequences is essential for quantification of cardiac function. The authors designed a method based on an extension of active contour models to detect both epicardial and endocardial borders on short-axis cardiac sequences spanning the entire cardiac cycle. They validated the results by comparing the computer-generated boundaries to the boundaries manually outlined by four expert observers on 44 clinical data sets. The mean boundary distance between the computer-generated boundaries and the manually outlined boundaries was 2.80 mm (sigma=1.28 mm) for the epicardium and 3.61 (sigma=1.68 mm) for the endocardium. These distances were comparable to interobserver distances, which had a mean of 3.79 mm (sigma=1.53 mm) for epicardial borders and 2.67 mm (sigma=0.88 mm) for endocardial borders. The correlation coefficient between the areas enclosed by the computer-generated boundaries and the average manually outlined boundaries was 0.95 for epicardium and 0.91 for endocardium. The algorithm is fairly insensitive to the choice of the initial curve. Thus, the authors have developed an effective and robust algorithm to extract left-ventricular boundaries from echocardiographic sequences.