Application of active contours with expert knowledge to heart ventricle segmentation

Abstract

Automatic heart ventricle segmentation in CT heart images can be an element of system supporting pulmonary embolism diagnosis. To solve that problem in this paper an application of two classical active contour models, snakes and geometric active contours, is proposed. The prepared implementation uses the unified model of those techniques which allows to define forces acting upon a contour only once. The nature of the images causes that the process of force construction requires additional expert knowledge since using only the information visible in the image satisfactory results cannot be obtained.