Computing the thickness of the ventricular heart wall from 3D MRI images
Gregory Golds, Mirza Faisal Beg · Proceedings of SPIE, the International Society for Optical Engineering/Proceedings of SPIE · 2005
A method for measuring the thickness of the ventricular heart wall from 3D MRI images is presented. The quantification of thickness could be useful clinically to measure the health of the heart muscle. The method involves extending a Laplace-equation-based definition of thickness between two surfaces to the ventricular heart wall geometry. Based on the functional organization of the heart, it is proposed that the heart be segmented into two volumes, the left ventricular wall which completely encloses the left ventricle and the right ventricular wall which attaches to the left ventricular wall to enclose the right ventricle, and that the thickness of these two volumes be calculated separately. An algorithm for performing this segmentation automatically is presented. The results of the automatic segmentation algorithm were compared to the results of manual segmentations of both normal and failing hearts and an average of 99.28% of ventricular wall voxels were assigned the same label in both the automatic and the manual segmentations. The thickness of eleven hearts, seven normal and four failing was measured.