Morphological image analysis of left-ventricular endocardial borders in 2D echocardiograms
Marian M. Choy, Jesse Sheng Jin · Proceedings of SPIE, the International Society for Optical Engineering/Proceedings of SPIE · 1996
Assessment of cardiac function using imaging techniques requires accurate identification of borders. We have developed a semi-automatic method for boundary detection of echocardiographic images. Our method combines morphological image analysis techniques with a second derivative operator, namely Laplican of Gaussian. Morphological filtering is used to reduce noise and increase contrast of the image. Results of second order filtering are used to locate edge points, as well as incorporate with morphological segmentation to extract the contour. We validate the results by comparing the computer generated contours to the contours manually outlined by an expert on the data sets. The average of the root mean square errors of the distances is 2.56 pixels (sigma equals 1.21 pixels) for the endocardial borders. The correlation coefficient between the areas enclosed is 0.99. Thus, by using morphological image analysis in echocardiographic images, the overall procedure is simple, efficient and produces encouraging results.