Automatic myocardium segmentation in late-enhancement MRI

We propose a novel automatic method to segment the myocardium on late-enhancement cardiac MR (LE CMR) images with a multi-step approach. First, in each slice of the LE CMR volume, a geometrical template is deformed so that its borders fit the myocardial contours. The second step consists in introducing a shape prior of the left ventricle. To do so, we use the cine MR sequence that is acquired along with the LE CMR volume. As the myocardial contours can be more easily automatically obtained on this data, they are used to build a 3D mesh representing the left ventricle geometry and the underlying myocardium thickness. This mesh is registered towards the contours obtained with the geometrical template, then locally adjusted to guarantee that scars are included inside the final segmentation. The quantitative evaluation on 27 volumes (272 slices) shows robust and accurate results.