An Overview of Techniques for Cardiac Left Ventricle Segmentation on Short-Axis MRI

¹ Krasovskii Institute of Mathematics and Mechanics, Yekaterinburg, Russia
² Ural Federal University, Yekaterinburg, Russia

^* Corresponding author: arseny.krasnobaev@gmail.com

Abstract

Nowadays, heart diseases are the leading cause of death. Left ventricle segmentation of a human heart in magnetic resonance images (MRI) is a crucial step in both cardiac diseases diagnostics and heart internal structure reconstruction. It allows estimating such important parameters as ejection faction, left ventricle myocardium mass, stroke volume, etc. In addition, left ventricle segmentation helps to construct the personalized heart computational models in order to conduct the numerical simulations. At present, the fully automated cardiac segmentation methods still do not meet the accuracy requirements. We present an overview of left ventricle segmentation algorithms on short-axis MRI. A wide variety of completely different approaches are used for cardiac segmentation, including machine learning, graph-based methods, deformable models, and low-level heuristics. The current state-of-the-art technique is a combination of deformable models with advanced machine learning methods, such as deep learning or Markov random fields. We expect that approaches based on deep belief networks are the most promising ones because the main training process of networks with this architecture can be performed on the unlabelled data. In order to improve the quality of left ventricle segmentation algorithms, we need more datasets with labelled cardiac MRI data in open access.