Automatic whole heart segmentation based on watershed and active contour model in CT images
Jing-Wen Bai, Pingan Li, Kehao Wang · 2016
Due to the complexity of the hearts anatomy blurred boundaries of its surrounding organs in cardiac CT images, the whole heart segmentation is still a big challenge. In this paper, method based on watershed and active contour models were proposed for the whole heart CT image segmentation task. Firstly, the Bilateral filtering approach is used to eliminate the noise of the cardiac CT images. Then, the watershed segmentation method is applied to determine the initial seed contours. Finally, the active contour model is adopted in the evolve process iteratively with the previous contour to obtain the precise segmentation boundaries for whole heart CT images. The performance is evaluated with a clinical cardiac CT images dataset, which proved good segementation results as well as the high robustness.