Automatic detection of the myocardial bounderies of the right and left ventricle in MR cardio perfusion scans

Recent advances in Magnetic Resonance Imaging allow fast recording of contrast enhanced myocardial perfusion scans. MR perfusion scans are made by recording, during a period of 20-40 seconds a number of short-axis slices through the myocardium. The scanning is triggered by the patient's ECG typically resulting in one set of slices per heart beat. For the perfusion analysis, the myocardial boundaries must be traced in all images Currently this is done manually, a tedious procedure, prone to inter- and intra-observer variability. In this paper a method for automatic detection of myocardial boundaries is proposed. This results in a considerable time reduction of the analysis and is an important step towards automatic analysis of cardiac MR perfusion scans. The most important consideration in the proposed approach is the use of not only spatial-intensity information, but also intensity-time and shape information to realize a robust segmentation. The procedure was tested on a total of 30 image sequences from 14 different scans. From 26 out of 30 sequences the myocardial boundaries were correctly found. The remaining 4 sequences were of very low quality and would most likely not be used for analysis.