• Progress in Medical Physics
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• v.10 no.3
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• pp.115-123
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• 1999

The two dimensional echocardiography is widely used to evaluate regional wall motion abnormality, because of its abilities to depict left ventricular wall motion. A number of researches have been processed for evaluation and quantitative analysis of left ventricular wall motion functions. In this paper, we proposed an algorithm which detects automatically and analyze quantitatively endocardial wall motion during systole. The echocardiograms were obtained in the short-axis views in normal subjects. Automated edge detection and endocardial contour tracking algorithm was applied to each frames, quantitative analysis based on segmentation was performed, pre-defined color overlays superimposed on the gray scale images, and the images was animated. The proposed algorithm provided automated, quantitative diagnosis of regional wall motion abnormality.

• Journal of KIISE:Software and Applications
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• v.37 no.4
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• pp.273-281
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• 2010

In this paper, we propose an automatic segmentation method of the endo- and epicardial boundary by using ray-casting profile based on intensity distribution and gradient information in CT images. First, endo-cardial boundary points are detected by using adaptive thresholding and seeded region growing. To include papillary muscles inside the boundary, the endo-cardial boundary points are refined by using ray-casting based profile. Second, epi-cardial boundary points which have both a myocardial intensity value and a maximum gradient are detected by using ray-casting based adaptive gradient profile. Finally, to preserve an elliptical or circular shape, the endo- and epi-cardial boundary points are refined by using elliptical interpolation and B-spline curve fitting. Then, curvature-based contour fitting is performed to overcome problems associated with heterogeneity of the myocardium intensity and lack of clear delineation between myocardium and adjacent anatomic structures. To evaluate our method, we performed visual inspection, accuracy and processing time. For accuracy evaluation, average distance difference and overalpping region ratio between automatic segmentation and manual segmentation are calculated. Experimental results show that the average distnace difference was $0.56{\pm}0.24mm$. The overlapping region ratio was $82{\pm}4.2%$ on average. In all experimental datasets, the whole process of our method was finished within 1 second.