A comparison of left ventricular border detection techniques applied to 2D echocardiograms

Abstract

Cardiology has been one of the most important areas of medicine. For several applications to diagnose the heart functions diseases the measurement of left ventricular (LV) cavity area and LV fractional area change are of vital necessity. To achieve this task, it is necessary to trace the border of left ventricle, which manual tracing is a tedious and time-consuming work. To solve this problem, many techniques to automate this border detection have been developed using the specialist tracing as gold standard. Methods: The purpose of this approach is to analyze the features of the main techniques applied to left ventricle border detection in medical imaging. To facilitate understanding, the left ventricle border detection techniques are divided into three categories: image-based techniques, model-based techniques and pixel-based techniques. For each of the category, a literature review was made to get examples of the techniques applied to left ventricle border detection and to describe them. The result of this review is a comparative table where the main features of each technique is compared. Conclusion: From the comparative table we can conclude that the not mentioning of many features of the techniques by the authors and the lack of a standardization of the evaluation techniques hamper a more satisfactory comparison.